Reflections on Henry James as a Novelist with Ethics.

Reflections on Henry James as a Novelist with Ethics. PDF Author: Dr. Malik S. Rokade
Publisher: Ashok Yakkaldevi
ISBN: 1387785540
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
In a 1999 article in PMLA Lawrence Buell highlights six major strands of thought influencing the current revival of ethical criticism in literary studies. The first is an approach interested in the "moral thematics and underlying value commitments of literary texts and their implied value," an approach Buell sees as a modernized version of the "Arnoldian-Leavisite conception of literature as ethical reflection." A second is "the intellectual history of moral thought from Puritanism to transcendentalism to pragmaticism and beyond," and a third the interest in the ethics of narrative and genre typified in the work of Wayne Booth, as well as more recently in works like Adam Newton's Narrative Ethics (8). This latter approach emphasizes the ethical implications of a text's (or as Booth calls it, an "implied author's) rhetorical commitments.

Reflections on Henry James as a Novelist with Ethics.

Reflections on Henry James as a Novelist with Ethics. PDF Author: Dr. Malik S. Rokade
Publisher: Ashok Yakkaldevi
ISBN: 1387785540
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a 1999 article in PMLA Lawrence Buell highlights six major strands of thought influencing the current revival of ethical criticism in literary studies. The first is an approach interested in the "moral thematics and underlying value commitments of literary texts and their implied value," an approach Buell sees as a modernized version of the "Arnoldian-Leavisite conception of literature as ethical reflection." A second is "the intellectual history of moral thought from Puritanism to transcendentalism to pragmaticism and beyond," and a third the interest in the ethics of narrative and genre typified in the work of Wayne Booth, as well as more recently in works like Adam Newton's Narrative Ethics (8). This latter approach emphasizes the ethical implications of a text's (or as Booth calls it, an "implied author's) rhetorical commitments.

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.

The Author of Beltraffio

The Author of Beltraffio PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1776534093
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 61

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Book Description
Often regarded as one of the most important literary figures of his era, American-born author Henry James possessed a unique knack for describing the idiosyncrasies of dysfunctional families. The Ambient family at the center of the novella The Author of Beltraffio ranks among his most compelling creations. The patriarch Mark Ambient is an acclaimed novelist whose wife strongly disapproves of his work. Will this discordance bring the family to its knees?

Henry James in Context

Henry James in Context PDF 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.

Meaning in Henry James

Meaning in Henry James PDF 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.

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.

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'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.

Henry Miller on Writing

Henry Miller on Writing PDF Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811201124
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.