Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing
LATE HENRY JAMES: MONEY, WAR AND THE END OF WRITING by EZRA NIELSEN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Myra Jehlen And approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey OCTOBER, 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing By Ezra Nielsen Dissertation director: Myra Jehlen My dissertation, Late Henry James: Money, War and the End of Writing, revises the dominant account of Henry James’s late work by reading it as an urgent response to its contemporary history. I hope to show that the impenetrability of James’s late work articulated his increasing perplexity before alien and intractable historical developments. In my account, James’s notoriously dense and elusive late style is in fact a plastic, encompassing, indeed lucid effort to understand certain social and political transformations. James’s late writings might be described as evolving toward a Conradian view of history, a sense that the modern social order is inherently rapacious and violent. For instance, The Golden Bowl, James’s last major completed novel, is a fiction of moral, historical, and epistemological crises, intertwined in the form of an all-encompassing, tortuously convoluted late style. His old themes and their moral orders have evolved into ii their own exaggerated convolutions, indeed have developed into irresolvable moral contradictions. Money, ascendant and aggressive, seems increasingly to define and control the moral realm.
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