SOURCE: Lee, David A. “Language and Perspective in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Prelude.’” In Twentieth-Century Fiction: From Text to Context, edited by Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber, pp. 113-25. London: Routledge, 1995.

In the following essay, Lee explores “the role of language in the mediation of perspective in both the literal and metaphorical sense” as exemplified in Mansfield's story “Prelude.”

The notion of ‘point of view’ or ‘perspective’ is one of the most frequently invoked concepts in stylistic analysis (Booth 1961). A distinction is often drawn between the point of view of the narrator and that of a character, for example, or between the perspective of one character and that of another. Writers themselves use the notion, sometimes structuring their work in such a way as to present their material from different viewpoints, sometimes interweaving different perceptions within a chapter, within a paragraph, within a sentence even. But what is ‘perspective...