Author: Adeline R. Tintner
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807125342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Conventional analyses of Henry James conclude with the completed novels of the major phase and the revisions of the New York Edition (1907–1909). -However, James lived on to write vigorously for nearly a decade longer. In this compelling study, Adeline R. Tintner—perhaps the foremost living James scholar—focuses her expertise on the writer’s final years, exploring how his work developed and how his ideas changed in response to events in the twentieth century. As Tintner illustrates, despite his age and the long career behind him, James heralded in his later works the modernism that would be most fully represented by Joyce, Eliot, and Proust. The twentieth century came to life for James during his long-delayed visit to America in 1904 and 1905. This trip resulted in his critical look at his native country, The American Scene (1907), a book Tintner argues is only now beginning to be appreciated. The trip also revitalized his review of his body of work in the famed New York Edition. Tintner explores James’s revisions of his earlier novels, especially of Roderick Hudson, The American, and, most important, the retouched Portrait of a Lady, in which he refined Isabel Archer’s aesthetic tastes to match his own. She also reads James’s late autobiographical writings as a form of experimental fiction that would be the hallmark of twentieth-century modernism. Indeed, Tintner explains that James’s final writings demonstrate how he thoroughly embraced the new century and anticipated several of the chief ideas that would dominate modern literature. He reacted to the new economy and to the preoccupation with money in his unfinished novel The Ivory Tower; explored the idea of the interaction between historical time and the present with his uncompleted The Sense of the Past; and expressed concern with the deprivation of culture among the lower middle classes. The “flying machine,” the “cinematograph,” and the “Kodak” entered his twentieth-century vocabulary, and he parodied his own “usurping consciousness” in his “Monologue for Ruth Draper.” James even relaxed his treatment of sexuality, as is apparent in his suggestion of autoeroticism in “The Figure in the Carpet” and in what seems to be a description of the gay scene in The Sacred Fount. He became a propagandist during World War I, devoting the end of his career to urging American entry into the conflict. His last published writings before he died of a stroke on February 28, 1916, were emotional tributes to casualties of the war. A fitting finale to Tintner’s five astonishing works on “the world of Henry James,” The Twentieth--Century World of Henry James will stand as one of the most significant volumes on the writer’s last years. Through an amazing excavation of James’s life and work, Tintner uncovers many of the modernist themes that preoccupied him as he entered the new century and that, in turn, were to preoccupy many of the writers who came to maturity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Penn State the History of the
ISBN: 9780271078526
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Explores how the novels of Henry James reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society, and how essential the language and imagery of the arts, as well as friendships with artists, were to James's writing.
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438116012
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
Presents critical analyses of five novels by Henry James, each with a plot summary and list of characters, and includes a biography of James, and an index of themes and ideas.
Author: Jonathan Freedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521499248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
A comprehensive collection of critical essays on the life and work of Henry James.
Author: Linda Simon
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Author: Clare Harris
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226317471
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues in The Museum on the Roof of the World that for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book is a powerful account of the museums created by, for, or on behalf of Tibetans and the nationalist agendas that have played out in them. Harris begins with the British public’s first encounter with Tibetan culture in 1854. She then examines the role of imperial collectors and photographers in representations of the region and visits competing museums of Tibet in India and Lhasa. Drawing on fieldwork in Tibetan communities, she also documents the activities of contemporary Tibetan artists as they try to displace the utopian visions of their country prevalent in the West, as well as the negative assessments of their heritage common in China. Illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this book addresses the pressing question of who has the right to represent Tibet in museums and beyond.
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
ISBN: 1805330918
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
“One of the most satisfying of all letter-writers.” — Spectator Henry James’s beautiful letters to his friend and inspiration, the unconventional art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner Surrounded by the artists, writers and musicians who made up her court in Boston as they did in Venice, Isabella Stewart Gardner, a passionate art collector, was as revered and sought after as royalty. Henry James was inspired by the rich and powerful Gardner, as well as by the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, when he wrote his novel The Wings of the Dove. Gardner was to recreate a larger-than-life version of Palazzo Barbaro in Boston, which is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. These dazzling letters bring to life James’s passion for Venice and the Palazzo Barbaro, and serve as an introduction to the fascinating world of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself.
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142437674
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 676
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Book Description
Henry James wrote with an imperial elegance of style, whether his subjects were American innocents or European sophisticates, incandescent women or their vigorous suitors. His omniscient eye took in the surfaces of cities, the nuances of speech, dress, and manner, and, above all, the microscopic interactions, hesitancies, betrayals, and self-betrayals that are the true substance of relationships. The entirely new Portable Henry James provides an unparalleled range of this great body of work: seven major tales, including Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Jolly Corner"; a sampling of revisions James made to some of his most famous work; travel writing; literary criticism; correspondences; autobiography; descriptions of the major novels; and parodies by famous contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Author: Millicent Bell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674557628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
Henry James rebelled intuitively against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of "what might have been" over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived--and no story written--except by submission to some outcome. The limiting conventions of society and literature are, he found, almost inescapable. In a major, comprehensive new study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction. Bell demonstrates how James's texts steadfastly, almost perversely at times, preserve a sense of alternative possibilities. James involves his characters in overlapping scenarios drawn from folklore, drama, literature, or naturalist formula. The reader engages, with the hero or heroine, in imagining many plots other than the one that finally-and often ambiguously--emerges. The story arouses expectations, proposes courses, then cancels them successively. In complicity with author and character, the reader crafts the story in an adventure of constant revision and anticipation. Literary meaning becomes an experience as well as a goal. In the end, revelations and resolutions, even if unclear or partial, assume an altered significance in light of the earlier imaginings. Not surprisingly, James's deepest sympathies lay with those characters who resisted entrapment by cultural expectations--his idealistic free spirits like Isabel, his marriage renouncers like Fleda Vetch, his largely silent and detached witnesses to life like Strether and the generous Maisie. They are frequently the victims of callous manipulators who box them into oppressive roles or who literally "plot against" them. By looking closely at James's critiques of clever" categorical mind and at his loving and complex portraits of characters of unfulfilled potentiality, Bell celebrates the paradoxes of James's story-denying fiction. In extended analyses of Daisy Miller," Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, "The Aspern Papers," The Spoils of Poynton, "The Turn of the Screw," What Maisie Knew, "The Beast in the Jungle," "The Jolly Corner," The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors, Bell relates James's work to influential movements of the day, notably impressionism and naturalism. She examines the influence of Hawthorne, Emerson, Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola on James at various periods throughout his career. Drawing on rich traditions of criticism and on stimulating recent theories, Bell forges a critical approach both accessible and profound for this elegant reading of one of the greatest writers of this or any time. It is a book that will be of high value and interest to the advanced scholar--marking out new ground in its methodology and offering innovative interpretations of James's fiction. At the same time, it will appeal equally to the general, reader, who will find his reading of James enriched by Bell's lucid and impassioned discussion.
Author: David McWhirter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521514614
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.
