A Stylistic Analysis of “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield, remembered as one of the finest writers of English short stories, enjoys enduring fame and a somewhat awesome literary status with her short stories, Miss Brill as one of her representative pieces. The interest of our Chinese critics, in general, locates more in the modernist techniques and devices she employs to present the inner world of the characters in her stories, than in her unique artistry in using language—commonly known as style— as a women writer. This thesis, however, is concerned primarily with the style of “Miss Brill”, and aims to provide an integrative, systematic stylistic analysis of the short story, deriving its underlying theories from a method of prose text analysis, proposed by literary stylists Leech & Short. The analysis is done in three main steps corresponding to the four main "linguistic levels" of a text: lexical levels, grammatically levels, figures of speech, and cohesion and context.