Download or read book Henry James Narrative Technique written by K. Boudreau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry James Narrative Technique situates Henry James famous method within an emerging modernist tradition with roots in philosophical debates between rationalism and empiricism. This cogent study considers James works in the context of nineteenth-century thought on consciousness, perception, and cognition. Kristin Boudreau makes the compelling argument that these philosophical discussions influenced James depictions of consciousness and are integral to his narrative technique.

Download or read book Meaning in Henry James written by Millicent Bell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Wings of the Dove written by Henry James and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young Londoners Kate and Merton are engaged, but have no money to marry on. When the wealthy but terminally ill American heiress Milly arrives in London, Kate schemes for a way to inherit her fortune. But when Kate achieves all she had hoped for, she finds that the money and the gentle, beautiful Milly have changed everything.

Download or read book The Art of the Novel written by Henry James and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing—character, plot, point of view, inspiration—and explains how he came to write novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American. As Blackmur puts it, “criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful.” The latest edition of this influential work includes a foreword by bestselling author Colm Tóibín, whose critically acclaimed novel The Master is told from the point of view of Henry James. As a guide not only to James’s inspiration and execution, but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of James’s fiction and to aspiring writers.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Henry James written by Jonathan Freedman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Henry James provides a critical introduction to James's work. Throughout the major critical shifts of the last fifty years, and despite suspicions of the traditional high literary culture which was James's milieu, he has retained a powerful hold on readers and critics alike. All essays are written at a level free from technical jargon, designed to promote accessibility to the study of James and his work.

Download or read book All a Novelist Needs written by Colm Tóibín and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tóibín’s remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James’s well-known texts.

Download or read book William and Henry James written by William James and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Henry James written by Sheldon M. Novick and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2007 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Henry James Goes to Paris written by Peter Brooks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Method of Henry James written by Joseph Warren Beach and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Daisy Miller written by Henry James and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2011-11-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Bostonians written by Henry James and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by Walter Besant and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Other House written by Henry James and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book How Fiction Works written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-07-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Turn of the Screw written by Henry James and published by Aegitas. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is a classic ghost story that continues to captivate readers over a century after its initial publication. Set in the late 19th century, the novella follows a young governess who is hired to care for two young children, Flora and Miles, at the remote and eerie Bly Manor. As the governess begins her duties, she becomes increasingly convinced that the manor is haunted by the spirits of the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover, Peter Quint, who both died under mysterious circumstances. The story unfolds as the governess tries to protect the children from the malevolent ghosts, while also questioning her own sanity and the motives of the children in their interactions with the spirits. One of the most intriguing aspects of The Turn of the Screw is its unreliable narrator. The story is told through the perspective of the governess, whose mental state and perceptions of events are constantly called into question. This creates a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty, leaving readers to question whether the ghosts are real or just figments of the governess's imagination. James masterfully plays with the theme of perception and reality, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions about the events at Bly Manor. Another striking element of the novella is its use of Gothic elements. The isolated location, the decaying mansion, and the presence of ghosts all contribute to the eerie atmosphere of the story. James also incorporates psychological horror, as the governess's fears and paranoia intensify throughout the story, building tension and suspense. The Turn of the Screw is a prime example of Gothic literature, with its exploration of the dark side of human nature and the blurred lines between the living and the dead. One of the most controversial aspects of the novella is its ambiguous ending. The governess's final confrontation with the ghosts and the fate of the children are left open to interpretation, inviting readers to ponder the true meaning of the story. Some critics argue that the ghosts are a product of the governess's overactive imagination, while others believe that they are real and that the children are in danger. This open-ended conclusion has sparked countless debates and interpretations, making The Turn of the Screw a thought-provoking and enduring piece of literature. In addition to its literary merits, The Turn of the Screw also offers insight into the societal norms and expectations of the time period in which it was written. James explores themes of gender roles and class distinctions through the character of the governess, who is expected to be subservient and obedient to her male employer and to maintain the social hierarchy between herself and the children. The story also touches on the taboo subject of sexual relationships, particularly in regards to the ghosts and their influence on the children. Ultimately, The Turn of the Screw is a haunting and enigmatic work that continues to captivate readers with its complex characters, Gothic atmosphere, and thought-provoking themes. It is a testament to Henry James's mastery of storytelling and his ability to create a sense of unease and suspense that lingers long after the final page. A must-read for anyone interested in Gothic literature, psychological thrillers, or the blurred lines between reality and the supernatural.

Download or read book The Ivory Tower written by Henry James and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of America's Gilded Age. After an absence of more than twenty years, James had returned for a visit to his native country; what he found there filled him with profound dismay. In The Ivory Tower, his last book, the characteristic pattern underlying so much of his fiction -- in which American "innocence" is transformed by its encounter with European "experience" -- receives a new twist: raised abroad, the hero comes home to America to confront, as James puts it, "the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions." James died in 1916 with the first three books of The Ivory Tower completed. He also left behind a "treatment," in which he charted the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario, one of only two to survive among James's papers, is also published here together with a striking critical essay by Ezra Pound. Book jacket.