Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691190216
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Henry James's reputation as The Master is so familiar that it's hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year--1875 to 1876--when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James's writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist's Paris year--and its momentous artistic and personal consequences. James's Paris story is one of enchantment and disenchantment. He initially loved Paris, he succeeded in meeting all the writers he admired (Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Daudet), and he witnessed the latest development in French painting, Impressionism. But James largely found the writers disappointing, and he completely misunderstood the paintings he saw. He also seems to have fallen in and out of love in a more ordinary sense--with a young Russian aesthete, Paul Zhukovsky. Disillusioned, James soon retreated to England--for good. But James would eventually be changed forever by his memories of Paris.
Author: Henry James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
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.
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781543072266
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
The American A social comedy about Christopher Newman, an American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Along the way, he finds a widow from an aristocratic French family.
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
Author: Adam Gopnik
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1849168431
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
In 1995, Adam Gopnik and his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York for the urbane glamour of Paris. Charmed by the beauties of the city, Gopnik set out to experience for himself the spirit and romance that has so captivated American writers throughout the Twentieth century. In the grand tradition of Stein and Hemingway, Gopnik planned to walk the paths of the Tuilleries, to enjoy philosophical discussion in cafes in short, to lead the fabled life of an American in Paris. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved 'Paris Journals' in the New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with everyday, not so fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals precede middle-of-the night baby feedings; afternoons are filled with trips to the Musee d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers are eaten while three star chefs debate a 'culinary crisis'. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik manages to weave the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful book.
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.
Author: Mirosława Buchholtz
Publisher: Dis/Continuities
ISBN: 9783631646014
Category : Conflict (Psychology) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The present volume on Henry James's life and work consists of five parts devoted to various forms and aspects of conflict. Apart from addressing James's attitude to two major conflicts, the Civil War and World War One, the articles range from critical discussions of James's biography, criticism, and fiction.
Author: Henry James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Author: Carol Hill
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393312294
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
"Henry James' Midnight Song is so exciting that I got up in the middle of the night to finish it--I couldn't sleep wondering what would happen next. Yet it is so intellectually complex that repeated readings only reveal richer meanings and more subtle shades of thought. In its virtuosity, as well as its themes and techniques, this novel puts Carol DeChellis Hill among postmodern masters such as Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, and Umberto Eco. She may even be better." --Judith Caesar, Philadelphia Inquirer
