Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James

Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James PDF Author: Tomoko Eguchi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443894117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This study re-locates the work of Henry James by revealing parallels between the aestheticism of John Ruskin and that of James. It explores a mix of well-known fictional texts alongside James’s essays and tales, which are less frequently analysed, but which, nevertheless, offer important insights into James’s attitude to his artistic method. Tracing James’s early development in comparison with Ruskin’s, this book also explores German Romantic thought and the idealism of Kant, Goethe and Hegel. While examining the German connections with James, this study is also alert to James’s relations with Walter Pater and French realism, to which James became increasingly close in the mid-1880s. Rather than placing James within one single category, it demonstrates how James interfused Romanticism and realism in establishing his own form of aestheticism. Shedding light on James’s period of apprenticeship, this book therefore articulates the Victorian concept of ‘aestheticism’ as used by James and Ruskin.

Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James

Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James PDF Author: Tomoko Eguchi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443894117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
This study re-locates the work of Henry James by revealing parallels between the aestheticism of John Ruskin and that of James. It explores a mix of well-known fictional texts alongside James’s essays and tales, which are less frequently analysed, but which, nevertheless, offer important insights into James’s attitude to his artistic method. Tracing James’s early development in comparison with Ruskin’s, this book also explores German Romantic thought and the idealism of Kant, Goethe and Hegel. While examining the German connections with James, this study is also alert to James’s relations with Walter Pater and French realism, to which James became increasingly close in the mid-1880s. Rather than placing James within one single category, it demonstrates how James interfused Romanticism and realism in establishing his own form of aestheticism. Shedding light on James’s period of apprenticeship, this book therefore articulates the Victorian concept of ‘aestheticism’ as used by James and Ruskin.

Acting Beautifully

Acting Beautifully PDF Author: Sigi Jottkandt
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791482758
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
What is the matter with the women in Henry James? In The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and his short story "The Altar of the Dead," one woman returns to a monster of a husband, another dies rather than confront the truth of her lover's engagement, while yet another stakes her all on having a candle lit for a dead lover, only to promptly reject it. Exploring these strange choices, Sigi Jöttkandt argues that the singularity of these acts lies in their ethical nature, and that the ethical principle involved cannot be divorced from the question of aesthetics. She combines close readings of James with suggestive tours through Kantian aesthetics and set theory to uncover the aesthetic underpinning of the Lacanian ethical act, which has been largely overlooked in the current drive to discover a Cartesian origin for the subject as the subject of science.

Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought

Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought PDF Author: Richard A. Hocks
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469640244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This brilliant new study is the first comprehensive and penetrating exploration of the complex and important aesthetic and intellectual relationship between the Jameses. Hocks relates organically what William thought to how Henry thought, and his convincing argument becomes a profound examination of Henry's mind and the way in which his work dramatized a particular philosophical attitude through its unique and felicitous style. Originally published in 1974. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Henry James's Europe

Henry James's Europe PDF Author: Dennis Tredy
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
As an American author who chose to live in Europe, Henry James frequentlywrote about cultural differences between the Old and New World. Theplight of bewildered Americans adrift on a sea of European sophisticationbecame a regular theme in his fiction.This collection of twenty-four papers from some of the world's leadingJames scholars offers a comprehensive picture of the author's crossculturalaesthetics. It provides detailed analyses of James's perception ofEurope - of its people and places, its history and culture, its artists andthinkers, its aesthetics and its ethics - which ultimately lead to a profoundreevaluation of his writing.With in-depth analysis of his works of fiction, his autobiographical andpersonal writings, and his critical works, the collection is a major contribution to current thinking about James, transtextuality and cultural appropriation.

Rose-Agathe (1878)

Rose-Agathe (1878) PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473366216
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
This early work by Henry James was originally published in 1878 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. One of thirteen children, James had an unorthodox early education, switching between schools, private tutors and private reading.. James published his first story, ‘A Tragedy of Error’, in the Continental Monthly in 1864, when he was twenty years old. In 1876, he emigrated to London, where he remained for the vast majority of the rest of his life, becoming a British citizen in 1915. From this point on, he was a hugely prolific author, eventually producing twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories and novellas, as well as literary criticism, plays and travelogues. Amongst James's most famous works are The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), The Bostonians (1886), and one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, The Turn of the Screw (1898). We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture

Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture PDF Author: Michele Mendelssohn
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748697543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself.

Righting the system

Righting the system PDF Author: Alexandra Dumont
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Henry James and Modern Moral Life

Henry James and Modern Moral Life PDF Author: Robert B. Pippin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521655477
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book argues that Henry James reveals in his fiction a sophisticated theory of moral understanding.

The Novel and the New Ethics

The Novel and the New Ethics PDF Author: Dorothy J. Hale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503614077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.

Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and West

Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and West PDF Author: Choon-Hee Kim
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527546454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This volume explores the world that shaped Henry James’s work and influenced his legacy through the themes of Jamesian cultural anxiety between and beyond spatio-temporal boundaries. As such, each chapter constructs a mode of reading to map and formulate one’s own cultural perspective in various contexts relying on their unique engagement with James’s and Jamesian creative acts of writing—aesthetics and science, the (auto-)biographical as social aspects, genre as literary-social context, the artistic and the economic, editorship and readership, and Asian perspectives on cultural influences and identities—to generate insights and establish new intercultural understandings. These are the traces of the contributors’ national, social, cultural consciousness that allow the definition of the Jamesian worldview as a particularly universal one in a global context.