Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece PDF Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871403285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece PDF Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871403285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Get Book Here

Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

William and Henry James

William and Henry James PDF Author: William James
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813916941
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family.

Henry James at Work

Henry James at Work PDF Author: Theodora Bosanquet
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The delightful memoir by James's feisty and feminist secretary, with a biographical essay and excerpts from her diaries

Daisy Miller

Daisy Miller PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 155111030X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the charming but inscrutable young American of the title shocks European society with her casual indifference to its social mores. The novella was popular in part because of the debates it sparked about foreign travel, the behaviour of women, and cultural clashes between people of different nationalities and social classes. This Broadview edition presents an early version of James’s best-known novella within the cultural contexts of its day. In addition to primary materials about nineteenth-century womanhood, foreign travel, medicine, philosophy, theatre, and art—some of the topics that interested James as he was writing the story—this volume includes James’s ruminations on fiction, theatre, and writing, and presents excerpts of Daisy Miller as he rewrote it for the theatre and for a much later and heavily revised edition.

Henry James

Henry James PDF Author: Sheldon M. Novick
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN: 0679450238
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
The New York Timescompared Sheldon M. Novick'sHenry James: The Young Masterto "a movie of James's life, as it unfolds, moment to moment, lending the book a powerful immediacy." Now, inHenry James: The Mature Master, Novick completes his super, revelatory two-volume account of one of the world's most gifted and least understood authors, and of a vanished world of aristocrats and commoners. Using hundreds of letters only recently made available and taking a fresh look at primary materials, Novick reveals a man utterly unlike the passive, repressed, and privileged observer painted by other biographers. Henry James is seen anew, as a passionate and engaged man of his times, driven to achieve greatness and fame, drawn to the company of other men, able to write with sensitivity about women as he shared their experiences of love and family responsibility. James, age thirty-eight as the volume begins, basking in the success of his first major novel,The Portrait of a Lady, is a literary lion in danger of being submerged by celebrity. As his finances ebb and flow he turns to the more lucrative world of the stage-with far more success than he has generally been credited with. Ironically, while struggling to excel in the theatre, James writes such prose masterpieces asThe Wings of the DoveandThe Golden Bowl. Through an astonishingly prolific life, James still finds time for profound friendships and intense rivalries.Henry James: The Mature Masterfeatures vivid new portraits of James's famous peers, including Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson; his close and loving siblings Alice and William; and the many compelling young men, among them Hugh Walpole and Howard Sturgis, with whom James exchanges professions of love and among whom he thrives. We see a master converting the materials of an active life into great art. Here, too, as one century ends and another begins, is James's participation in the public events of his native America and adopted England. As the still-feudal European world is shaken by democracy and as America sees itself endangered by a wave of Jewish and Italian immigrants, a troubled James wrestles with his own racial prejudices and his desire for justice. With the coming of world war all other considerations are set aside, and James enlists in the cause of civilization, leaving his greatest final works unwritten. Hailed as a genius and a warm and charitable man-and derided by enemies as false, effeminate, and self-infatuated-Henry James emerges here as a major and complex figure, a determined and ambitious artist who was planning a new novel even on his deathbed. InHenry James: The Mature Master, he is at last seen in full; along with its predecessor volume, this book is bound to become t

Hawthorne

Hawthorne PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description


Monopolizing the Master

Monopolizing the Master PDF Author: Michael Anesko
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804782644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Henry James defied posterity to disturb his bones: he was adamant that his legacy be based exclusively on his publications and that his private life and writings remain forever private. Despite this, almost immediately after his death in 1916 an intense struggle began among his family and his literary disciples to control his posthumous reputation, a struggle that was continued by later generations of critics and biographers. Monopolizing the Master gives a blow-by-blow account of this conflict, which aroused intense feelings of jealousy, suspicion, and proprietorship among those who claimed to be the just custodians of James's literary legacy. With an unprecedented amount of new evidence now available, Michael Anesko reveals the remarkable social, political, and sexual intrigue that inspired—and influenced—the deliberate construction of the Legend of the Master.

Henry James Goes to Paris

Henry James Goes to Paris PDF Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691129549
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
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The New York Stories of Henry James

The New York Stories of Henry James PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174321
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
Henry James led a wandering life, which took him far from his native shores, but he continued to think of New York City, where his family had settled for several years during his childhood, as his hometown. Here Colm Tóibín, the author of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Master, a portrait of Henry James, brings together for the first time all the stories that James set in New York City. Written over the course of James’s career and ranging from the deliciously tart comedy of the early “An International Episode” to the surreal and haunted corridors of “The Jolly Corner,” and including “Washington Square,” the poignant novella considered by many (though not, as it happens, by the author himself) to be one of James’s finest achievements, the nine fictions gathered here reflect James’s varied talents and interests as well as the deep and abiding preoccupations of his imagination. And throughout the book, as Tóibín’s fascinating introduction demonstrates, we see James struggling to make sense of a city in whose rapidly changing outlines he discerned both much that he remembered and held dear as well as everything about America and its future that he dreaded most. Stories included: The Story of a Masterpiece A Most Extraordinary Case Crawford’s Consistency An International Episode The Impressions of a Cousin The Jolly Corner Washington Square Crapy Cornelia A Round of Visits

Dearly Beloved Friends

Dearly Beloved Friends PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472030002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The romantic side of Henry James, revealed through his letters to young male friends