Reading Henry James in the Twenty-First Century

Reading Henry James in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Dennis Tredy
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527535452

To commemorate the recent centennial of Henry James’s death and to help readers understand the depth and scope of the author’s influence both today and during the previous century, thirty leading Jamesian scholars from twelve different countries and five continents were asked to explore ways in which the notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘transmission’ currently come into play when reading James. The resulting chapters of this volume are divided into three main sections, each focusing on different ways in which James’s legacy is being re-evaluated today—from his influence on key authors, playwrights and film-makers over the past century (Part One), to new discoveries regarding European authors and artists who influenced James (Part Two), to recent approaches more radically re-evaluating James for the twenty-first century, including contemporary poetics, political and sociological dimensions, cognitive science, and queer studies (Part Three). This collection will be of great interest to scholars and general readers of James, and is a useful guide to tracing the writer’s ever-elusive ‘figure in the carpet’ and understanding the power of his continued impact today.

What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1908
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

After her parents� bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled between her selfish mother and vain father, who value her only as a means for provoking each other. Maisie � solitary, observant and wise beyond her years � is drawn into an increasingly entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual betrayal, until she is finally compelled to choose her own future. What Maisie Knew is a subtle yet devastating portrayal of an innocent adrift in a corrupt society. Part of a relaunch of three James titles.

Henry James in Context

Henry James in Context
Author: David McWhirter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2010-09-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521514614

The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.

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.

Henry James

Henry James
Author: Sheldon M. Novick
Publisher: Random House (NY)
Total Pages: 657
Release: 2007
Genre: Authors, American
ISBN: 0679450238

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

Studies in Henry James

Studies in Henry James
Author: Richard P. Blackmur
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1983
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780811208635

"A bibliographical note: Blackmur's essays on Henry James": p. 243-244. Includes index.

How Fiction Works

How Fiction Works
Author: James Wood
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2008-07-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780374173401

What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

Daisy Miller

Daisy Miller
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2011-11-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 155111030X

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.

The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl
Author: Henry James
Publisher: anboco
Total Pages: 666
Release: 2016-09-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3736414536

The Golden Bowl explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail but also with powerful insight. The title is a quotation from Ecclesiastes 12:6, "...or the golden bowl be broken, ...then shall the dust return to the earth as it was".

The American

The American
Author: Henry James
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2017-02-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781543072266

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.