Miss Brill

by Katherine Mansfield

Miss Brill: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

"Miss Brill" is an example of modernism, a literary movement that began in the late 19th century and was well-established by the time Mansfield published this story in 1920. Rejecting earlier styles of prose writing as stuffy and inauthentic, modernists strove to depict human consciousness as accurately as possible. Many modernists employed the "stream-of-consciousness" style developed by writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, which prioritizes a character's impressions and feelings, however fleeting they might be, over an orderly style of writing or a straightforward plot.