Meeting of the Traditional and the Modern: Jane Austen’s Emma and Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea”
Keywords:
Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Emma, A Cup of Tea, Free indirect discourse, postmodernismAbstract
By the time Katherine Mansfield started writing her stories, it had become almost a fashion to look down on Jane Austen and consider her work as dull or at the best outmoded. Yet the gap between Jane Austen and early 20th century writers is not always as very wide as it might seem – one can find Modernists who not only admired Austen but found in her work inspiration for their own art. One of these is arguably the New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield. This paper will focus on some general similarities in Mansfield’s and Austen’s approaches, discuss affinities in their uses of free indirect discourse and provide a comparative analysis of Austen’s novel Emma and Mansfield’s short story “A Cup of Tea.” Not only in the use of free indirect discourse, but in terms of characters, plot, and structure do these two works contain major commonalities.
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