Revisiting Literary Impressionism: Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill" and the Limits of Suzanne Ferguson's Modernist Short-Story Theory

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Language Teaching, Ker., C., Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of English, Ha. C., Islamic Azad University, Hamedan, Iran.

Abstract

Theories of Modernist short story focus on internal mechanisms of formal techniques that are utilized in the work for producing meaning and impressions. Those techniques mark the difference that Modernist literature bear with the traditional or Realistic literature and art that tended to imitate and reflect a detached reality. One theory is by Suzanne Ferguson which accounts for certain features of the Modernist short story. She believes that all the features are shared by Impressionism in arts and defines the modernist short story based on such features. In the first part of the present study, an overview of Ferguson’s theory is given. After presenting and discussing Ferguson’s views regarding the modernist short story, the article focuses its attention on Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill.” It argues that while “Miss Brill” is indeed a prime example of the modernist short story that demonstrates seven characteristics presented by Ferguson, Mansfield’s use of free indirect discourse, the cumulative pattern of observation in the park, and the transformation of this setting into a “metaphoric plot” interrogates and complicates these features, providing a more nuanced understanding of how the impressionist method stages alienation.

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Main Subjects

Critical Literary Studies

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 03 October 2026

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History

  • Receive Date: 19 March 2026
  • Revise Date: 01 September 2026
  • Accept Date: 03 October 2026

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