Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture

Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture
Author: Michele Mendelssohn
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2014-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748697543

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.

Henry James and the Culture of Publicity

Henry James and the Culture of Publicity
Author: Richard Salmon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1997-10-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521562492

This book examines the relationship between the writings of Henry James and the historical formation of mass culture. Throughout his career, James was concerned with such characteristically modern cultural forms as advertising, biography and the New Journalism, forms which together constituted the 'devouring publicity' of modern life. Richard Salmon's study situates James's fiction and criticism within the context of the contemporary debates surrounding these rival discursive practices. He explores both the nature of James's contribution to the critique of mass culture and the extent of his immersion within it. James's persistent and ambivalent negotiation of the boundaries between private and public experience ranged from a defence of the artist's right to privacy, to his own counter-practice of publicity.

Henry James's Europe

Henry James's Europe
Author: Dennis Tredy
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1906924368

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 James and the Queerness of Style

Henry James and the Queerness of Style
Author: Kevin Ohi
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780816665112

The true meaning of being fashionably late in Henry James's late works.

Henry James and the 'Woman Business'

Henry James and the 'Woman Business'
Author: Alfred Habegger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2004-08-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521609437

This is a historical critique of Henry James in relation to nineteenth-century feminism and women's fiction. Habegger has brought to light extensive new documentation on James's tangled connections with what was thought and written about women in his time. The emphasis is equally on his life and on his fictions. This is the first book to investigate his father's bizarre lifelong struggle with free love and feminism, a struggle that played a major role in shaping James. The book also shows how seriously he distorted the truth about the cousin, Minnie Temple, whose self-assertive image inspired him; and how indebted he was to certain American women writers whom he attacked in reviews but whose plots and heroines he appropriated in his own fiction.

Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation

Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation
Author: Sara Blair
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1996-01-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521497503

This 1996 book describes a new Henry James who, rather than being paraded as a beacon of high culture, actually expresses a nuanced understanding of, and engagement with, popular culture. Arguing against recent trends in critical studies which locate racial resistance in popular culture, Sara Blair uncovers this resistance within literature and high modernism. She analyses a variety of texts from early travel writing to The Princess Casamassima, The American Scene and The Tragic Muse, always setting the scene through descriptions of key events of the time such as Jack the Ripper's murders. Blair makes a powerful case for reading James with a sense of sustained contradiction and her project absorbingly argues for the historical and ongoing importance of literary texts and discourses to the study of culture and cultural value.

Mrs. Osmond

Mrs. Osmond
Author: John Banville
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101972890

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea continues the story of Isabel Archer, the young protagonist of Henry James’s beloved The Portrait of a Lady—in this masterful novel of betrayal, corruption, and moral ambiguity. Eager but naïve, in James’s novel Isabel comes into a large, unforeseen inheritance and marries the charming, penniless, and—as Isabel finds out too late—cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond. Here Banville imagines Isabel’s second chapter telling the story of a woman reawakened by grief and the knowledge that she has been grievously wronged, and determined to resume her quest for freedom and independence.

Professions of Taste

Professions of Taste
Author: Jonathan Freedman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804721783

The author traces Henry James's career-long encounter with the tradition of British aestheticism and places both in the context of the late-19th-century's professionalization and commodification of literary life. Professions of Taste reopens the question of later James in a new fashion and with a new perspective. A richer genealogy of modernism, and indeed postmodernism, begins to take shape, in which both the problematics of British aestheticism and James's relations with it play an important role. This book aims to enlighten the reader's understanding of the way Pre-Raphaelite concerns fertilized the aestheticist breeding grounds of Anglo-American modernism.

The Other Henry James

The Other Henry James
Author: John Carlos Rowe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780822321477

Rowe uses recent work on the oppressive treatment of gays, women and children in his analysis of Henry James, arguing that James mounts a critique of bourgeois values and lack of historical consciousness.