DOCSLIB.ORG

Teaching the “Grandsons of Balzac” a Lesson: Henry James in the 1890'S

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Teaching the “Grandsons of Balzac” a Lesson: Henry James in the 1890'S Teaching the “Grandsons of Balzac” a Lesson: Henry James in the 1890’s Dennis F. Tredy Lyall H. Powers, in Henry James and the Naturalist Movement, dubs the period spanning from “The Art of Fiction” in 1884 to The Tragic Muse in 1890 Henry James’s “Naturalist Experiment”, and rightfully so (Powers 3). There is much evidence, in James’s own notebooks, that The Bostonians was influenced by Daudet’s L’Évangeliste, The Princess Casamassima by Turgeneff’s Virgin Soil, and The Tragic Muse by the narrative techniques of Maupassant (NB 47, Powers 91, NB 92), and Powers effectively shows how James adopted many of the main tenets of Zola and Goncourt’s doctrine throughout the period. Powers concludes with a line from Ezra Pound, who in 1935 pointed out that “all James would seem to be a corollary to one passage” in Goncourt’s 1879 preface to Les Frères Zemganno, which predicted that “a painter of talent” would one day apply “the cruel analyses” he and Zola “brought to the painting of the lowest of society” to “settings of education and distinction“ (Powers 179-180, Pound 269-270, Goncourt 55). However, if the epithet fits, it certainly does not apply to “all James”, as Pound put it. There is a world of difference between le roman expérimental à la Emile Zola of the 1880’s and the Jamesian experimental novel of the 1890’s, and analysis of James’s critical works on the “grandsons of Balzac” show an author critical of their teachings, striving in the late 1880’s and the 1890’s to distance himself from the movement, which is made apparent by his changing appellations for the young French school in reviews and letters: from “la jeune école sérieuse” to the “propagators” of ”the Parisian contagion“ (LC2 403, HJL3 33), from the “new votaries of realism“ to the “finished, besotted mandarins” of the Parisian “Empire” (LC2 1012, HJL3 265). Our emphasis will then be more on James’s break from the French Naturalist School than on his adherence to it, and we will discuss how the experimental novels of the late 1890’s are in many ways the conjoint product of a refutation of the main precepts of Naturalism, an affinity to the deviant methods of Maupassant in particular, and the hard-learned lessons of the London theater. It is of course difficult to separate stricture from laudation in James’s ambivalent comments on the Naturalist School during this period. James had far greater respect for the group’s dedication to the “serious” application of a “heroic system” (LC1 122) than for the doctrine itself. When commenting on their theoretic discours d’escorte, James asserts that the saving grace of the French Naturalist is that his doctrine, “so jejune if taken literally, is fruitful as in practice he romantically departs from it,” that Zola “reasons less powerfully than he represents” and that Maupassant and even Flaubert were far better “story-tellers” than “philosophers” (LC2 1248, LC1 58, LC2 522). James had particular appreciation for those who deviated from the doctrine, who were card-carrying members but dissidents in practice, who were both inside and outside the circle. Hence his appreciation, though qualified, of Maupassant’s “illusionism”, Turgenev’s “surnaturalism” and what James saw as Daudet’s “poetic realism” (LC2 230). Contributing to this ambivalence is the non-negligible fact that during this period of Jamesian transition the sons and grandsons of Balzac were dying off (Turgenev in 1883, Taine and Maupassant in 1893, Goncourt and Daudet in 1896 and 1897), creating Jamesian reviews that carefully counterpoised harsh criticism with eulogistic praise, and that left Zola alone to bear the full brunt of James’s critical pen. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of how James himself deviated from the Naturalist group is to piece together comments made on their work and method in his reviews of the period, in order to see just how different from his own James felt their standards of literary construction to be, as a basis of comparison with what Sara Blair has called James’s “master trope”, the oft-cited Jamesian “house of fiction” (Blair 59). One of the most frequent and most disdainful remarks concerning the French constructions was of course the lack of taste, “the most human faculty we possess” (LC2 868), that went into the choice of materials and the overall uncleanliness of the finished product, its “need for disinfectants and deodorizers” (LC2 862). If, as James says in an 1883 article on Daudet, the term modernity is a “barbarous substantive” (LC2 229), he seems to feel that the “modern effort” of the Naturalists was by and large the promotion of “substantive barbarism”, in which the French “house of fiction” was too often an overblown but run-down tenement and “nature” too exclusively “a combination of a cesspool and the house of prostitution” (LC2 866). For James, their building plans did not call for a “sense of beauty,” revealing instead their penchant for the sense of “the strange and the grotesque” (Flaubert), of the “warped and perverted” (Goncourt) and of “the ugly and the unclean” (Zola) (LC2 231). As vehement as these reproaches were, James himself would have had to admit that these are more differences in aesthetic preference and choice of building site than actual Tredy, Dennis F.. “Teaching the ‘Grandsons of Balzac’ a Lesson: Henry James in the 1890’s.” EREA 2.1 (printemps x 2004): x-xv.<www.e-rea.org> defects of construction. They are however related to a main design flaw that James refers to quite frequently, that of a lack of windows in their house of fiction. In 1888, James reminded the Naturalists that the question is always “how many windows are opened, how many little holes are pierced, into the consciousness of the artist” (LC2 414). For James, all but Daudet lacked a window on “humor” and “wit” (LC2 869-870), all lacked a window on “the private soul” (LC2 255), and only Turgeneff consistently left a door open to the “great back yard” of the imagination (LC1 1012). Even Maupassant, despite his pervasive command of the human senses, was said to forego an aperture on “the reflexive part” of the his characters” consciousness (LC2 547), and he too had a window towards morality and “higher motives” that presented “a perfectly dead wall” (LC2 531). James gives us the result of such oversights in 1888: “We end with the sensation of a closed room, of a want of ventilation; we long to open a window or two and let in the air of the world.” (LC2 413). There were of course other “defects” that James noted during his assessments. Zola especially, and others when they emulated him, was guilty of a “defect” in his “sense of proportion” (LC2 881). The “heavy completeness” of his attempts to mirror what he saw as “Nature” in its entirety resulted in “strong, complicated scaffolding” for a “house whose foundations refuse to bear it” and which, unlike la cathédrale balzacienne that so inspired it, “topples over” under its own weight (LC2 876). However, the most damning of James’s “constructive criticism”, as it were, was that the “grandsons of Balzac” all endeavored to build their houses of fiction from the outside. Thus, Zola set up his massive subject “wholly from the outside, proposing [...] to get into [...] its depths as he went” (LC2 876). He describes Flaubert as a “sentinel” or “statue” listening to the world from “the outer court” of his château-fort but never pressing his ear to “the chamber of the soul” (LC2 313), and at such a distance from his depicted world that he seemed to paint it with a “brush twenty feet long” (LC2 256). In terms of characterization, James makes similar comments on Daudet, on Turgenev, and on Maupassant, who he claims displays a “bird’s-eye-view contempt” for the ugliness of his characters” world (LC2 248, LC1 1022, LC2 527). James’s literary construction of course calls for the building of a house of fiction from the inside out, around a human subject and an artistic consciousness, with innumerable windows looking out on the human scene (LC2 1075). This Naturalist tendency can be traced back to the movement’s origins in the 1860’s, when Taine put forth his famous theory on the trinity of la race, le milieu et le moment, which even then James noted as being inadequate for the “various complications” of the “human organism” (LC2 829). Taine went on to preach for the complete study of the “external man” as the avenue by which one reaches the true essence of the “internal man” (Taine ix), which was picked up by Zola in his call to analyze the “physiological man” and leave the obsolete “metaphysical man” behind (Œuvres X 1203). What James realized was that the long-standing French “scientific method”—from Balzac’s equating the human kingdom to the animal kingdom so as to sort it into phyla, to Zola’s call to be “anatomists” studying the “human cadaver” in literature as Claude Bernard had done in medicine (Œuvres XI 99), as well as his call to “classify” the vast world of “human documents” (Œuvres X 1316)—inevitably meant the dehumanization and the de facto reification of the human element in fiction. Hence James in his reviews refers to Naturalist characterization as the presentation of creatures that “can’t for an instant stand on their legs”, of “mechanical dolls” tossed away once they have been used, of “puppets” on strings and as “contemptible” human “furniture” cluttering their houses of fiction (LC2 870, 224, 531, 536).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Henry James and the Ethics of Recollection
    doi: https://doi.org/10.26262/exna.v1i1.5993 Henry James and the Ethics of Recollection Greg Zacharias Center for Henry James Studies, Creighton University, U.S.A. Abstract Henry James’s melancholic quality of mind enabled him to understand his relation to the past so that he could free himself of its hold without, at the same time, separating himself from it. It shaped his way of living. As James demonstrates in his notebooks, his past remains with him through his awareness and naming of it. His melancholy relation to the past enables him to use it as part of his identity and, at the same time, as part of the changes to that identity. This is James’s melancholy practice of “facing” his past. His way of using memory, engaging the past as he recalls it, the uses to which he puts the products of that engagement, establishes the ethics of recollection. To develop this study, the essay uses work on melancholy from Sigmund Freud, Jonathan Flatley, Heather Love, David McWhirter, and Lynda Zwinger. Keywords: memory, autobiography, melancholy, mourning. In late August 1881, towards the very end of a six-year absence from the United States, Henry James completed the serial version of The Portrait of a Lady. From that time until his departure from England on his way to the United States on 20 October, he attended to the Portrait’s book version. Finishing Portrait was a condition James set for himself in order to return to his family and homeland. It was a condition of living he established for his reunification with his family.
    [Show full text]
  • RENUNCIATION and SELF-REALIZATION in SELECTED NOVELS of HENRY JAMES APPROVED: Major Professor Minor Professor * Director
    RENUNCIATION AND SELF-REALIZATION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES APPROVED: Major Professor Minor Professor * Director of"tF© Department of English Dean of the Graduate School RENUNCIATION AND SELF-REALIZATION IN SELECTED NOVELS OP HENRY JAMES THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Susan Lee. Edwards, B. A, Denton, Texas August, 1969 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. ISABEL ARCHER l6 III. LAMBERT STRETHER 42 IV. MILLY THEALE 6l V. MAGGIE VERVER 80 VI. CONCLUSION lOO BIBLIOGRAPHY 106 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Henry James's novels explore the venerable theme of the individual's relation to society. His work describes and analyzes the problem from the perspective of characters who are not aware, at first, that a conflict exists. It is as a result of his concentration on his protagonists's devel- oping awareness that James is designated a psychological novelist. His central characters's discovery of the rela- tivity of social values and their subsequent recognition of the possible validity of purely personal conscience comprise the bulk of his novels. The psychological and environmental pressure which requires the protagonists to choose between their own newly recognized values and society's constitutes the remainder. James's characters, in deciding to abide by their personal ideals, renounce society's offered rewards, but they gain the intangible benefit of living up to their perceived vision. Because it involves rejection of societal values, James's theme of renunciation is generally considered life- denying.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry James , Edited by Adrian Poole Frontmatter More Information
    Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-01143-4 — The Princess Casamassima Henry James , Edited by Adrian Poole Frontmatter More Information the cambridge edition of the complete fiction of HENRY JAMES © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-01143-4 — The Princess Casamassima Henry James , Edited by Adrian Poole Frontmatter More Information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-01143-4 — The Princess Casamassima Henry James , Edited by Adrian Poole Frontmatter More Information the cambridge edition of the complete fiction of HENRY JAMES general editors Michael Anesko, Pennsylvania State University Tamara L. Follini, University of Cambridge Philip Horne, University College London Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge advisory board Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles Ian F. A. Bell, Keele University Gert Buelens, Universiteit Gent Susan M. Grifn, University of Louisville Julie Rivkin, Connecticut College John Carlos Rowe, University of Southern California Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Yale University Greg Zacharias, Creighton University © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-01143-4 — The Princess Casamassima Henry James , Edited by Adrian Poole Frontmatter More Information the cambridge edition of the complete fiction of HENRY JAMES 1 Roderick Hudson 23 A Landscape Painter and Other Tales, 2 The American 1864–1869 3 Watch and Ward 24 A Passionate
    [Show full text]
  • Strings of Pearls: James, Maupassant, and 'Paste' Philip Horne
    1 Strings of Pearls: James, Maupassant, and ‘Paste’ Philip Horne (UCL) Les perles composent le collier, mais c’est le fil qui fait le collier. Or, enfiler les perles sans en perdre une seule et toujours tenir son fil de l’autre main, voilà la malice… [The pearls compose the necklace, but it is the string which makes it a necklace. Now, to thread the pearls without losing a single one and always to hold one’s string with the other hand, there’s the trick…] (Gustave Flaubert, letter To Louise Colet, 26 August 1853)1 a case of feeling, of ever so many possible feelings, stretched across the scene like an attached thread on which the pearls of interest are strung (Henry James, Preface (1908) to The Princess Casamassima (1886))2 i À la Maupassant 1 Consulted 23 December 2018 at http://flaubert.univ- rouen.fr/correspondance/conard/outils/1853.htm 2 Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1092. (Hereafter LC II.) This essay began as a lecture given on 21 October 2016 at the Third International Conference of the European Society of Jamesian Studies at the American University of Paris, entitled “Reading Henry James in the Twenty-First Century: Heritage and Transmission”. I owe particular thanks to Denis Tredy for his extremely helpful ‘Teaching the “Grandsons of Balzac” a Lesson: Henry James in the 1890’s’ (E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone, 2.1 (2004)), and to Mary Boyington, for her richly detailed PhD thesis, ‘«Esprit de Maupassant»: Henry James and French Realism, A Re-evaluation’ (Aix-Marseille Université, 2017).
    [Show full text]
  • Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity
    Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity Edited by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity, Edited by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4417-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4417-8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Preface ........................................................................................ viii A “Curious Duplicity” Dennis Tredy Acknowledgements ................................................................................. xxii List of Abbreviations.............................................................................. xxiii Part One: Duplicitous Subtexts Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 Henry James Gambling on Ghosts: The “Private Source” of The Turn of the Screw Jean Perrot Chapter Two.............................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Intonation in Henry James
    Faculty of English ‘The Auditive Intelligence’: Intonation in Henry James James Lello St Catharine’s College University of CamBridge This dissertation is suBmitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy DecemBer 2019 ABSTRACT This thesis seeks to retrieve the ‘auditive intelligence’ in the work of Henry James, but it does so by first recognising some of the theoretical and historical obstacles that lie in the way of such a recovery. Structural linguistics has been responsible for encouraging the assumption that there are no better or worse ways of speaking, that the differences between writing and speech are of little significance, and that tone is merely a subset of language. James’s formulation of the ‘auditive intelligence’ in his revised essay on the French actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1915) emerges in opposition to further, historically situated, impediments: the lack of any ‘serious study’ of tone, the false choice between saying and doing, the theatrical vogue for pictorialism, and the priority of the eye over the ear. The ‘auditive intelligence’ makes it possible to conceive of tone as in itself a complete drama, a revelatory instant where previously concealed relations suddenly adopt an emphatic salience. In The Tragic Muse (1890) the discrimination of tone, both as a quality of the voice and of its discernment, emerges as one form this intelligence takes. This mode of personal and cultural edification is developed with reference to ‘The Question of Our Speech’ (1905), James’s essays on the speech and manners of American women (1906-1907), The Awkward Age (1899), and The Ambassadors (1903). The discrimination of tone depends upon the accumulation and fulfilment of experience, and this is particularly evident when tone remains long after the death of its speaker, or else is capable of preserving life itself.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry James and Romantic Revisionism: the Quest for the Man of Imagination in the Late Work
    HENRY JAMES AND ROMANTIC REVISIONISM: THE QUEST FOR THE MAN OF IMAGINATION IN THE LATE WORK A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (OF ENGLISH ) By Daniel Rosenberg Nutters May 2017 Examining Committee Members: Daniel T. O’Hara, Advisory Chair, English Alan Singer, English Steve Newman, English Robert L. Caserio, External Member, Pennsylvania State University Jonathan Arac, External Member, University of Pittsburgh © Copyright 2017 by Daniel Rosenberg Nutters All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT This study situates the late work of Henry James in the tradition of Romantic revisionism. In addition, it surveys the history of James criticism alongside the academic critique of Romantic-aesthetic ideology. I read The American Scene, the New York Edition Prefaces, and other late writings as a single text in which we see James refashion an identity by transforming the divisions or splits in the modern subject into the enabling condition for renewed creativity. In contrast to the Modernist myth of Henry James the master reproached by recent scholarship, I offer a new critical fiction – what James calls the man of imagination – that models a form of selfhood which views our ironic and belated condition as a fecund limitation. The Jamesian man of imagination encourages the continual (but never resolvable) quest for a coherent creative identity by demonstrating how our need to sacrifice elements of life (e.g. desires and aspirations) when we confront tyrannical circumstances can become a prerequisite for pursuing an unreachable ideal. This study draws on the work of post-war Romantic revisionist scholarship (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • Replace This with the Actual Title Using All Caps
    DESOLATE THEATRICALITY: STAGING FEELING AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LATE NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Daining Lily Cui May, 2014 © 2014 Daining Lily Cui DESOLATE THEATRICALITY: STAGING FEELING AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE LATE NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES Daining Lily Cui, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation argues that Henry James’s late novels produce the textual effects of subjectivity (feeling, a sense of psychological depth) while dissolving the subject who ostensibly experiences them. James’s incorporation of dramatic point of view into the novel is widely recognized as a foundational moment for narrative theory, but it has rarely been analyzed in conjunction with the theatrical structure of consciousness that emerges in late Jamesian characterization. James presents character through various theatrical means—for instance, by transferring the work of characterization from narration to dialogue or objectifying a character’s consciousness as a building with which she interacts. In the same gesture, however, he dematerializes the subject who is thereby being made available; the proliferating dialogue only more insistently announces a character’s disappearance from the diegetic space of the novel, and the building that ostensibly figures consciousness threatens to collapse amid a dizzying involution of alternative referents. Processes of theatrical objectification and dematerialization are therefore inextricably linked in late James. In economics, dematerialization refers to a reduction in the amount of material required to serve a given function; in James, that material is most often human, whether it be a consciousness whose perspective is never actually inhabited by the narrator who seems to be dwelling in it, or a character who literally disappears from the pages of a novel in order for her “development” to be narratively expedited.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry James Frontmatter More Information
    Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-00400-9 - The Portrait of a Lady Henry James Frontmatter More information the cambridge edition of the complete fiction of HENRY JAMES © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-00400-9 - The Portrait of a Lady Henry James Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-00400-9 - The Portrait of a Lady Henry James Frontmatter More information the cambridge edition of the complete fiction of HENRY JAMES general editors Michael Anesko, Pennsylvania State University Tamara L. Follini, University of Cambridge Philip Horne, University College London Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge advisory board Martha Banta, University of California, Los Angeles Ian F. A. Bell, Keele University Gert Buelens, Universiteit Gent Susan M. Griffin, University of Louisville Julie Rivkin, Connecticut College John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Yale University Greg Zacharias, Creighton University © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-00400-9 - The Portrait of a Lady Henry James Frontmatter More information the cambridge edition of the complete fiction of HENRY JAMES 1 Roderick Hudson 18 The Ambassadors 2 The American 19 The Golden Bowl 3 Watch and Ward 20 The Outcry 4 The Europeans 21 The Sense of the Past 5 Confidence 22 The Ivory Tower 6 Washington Square 23 A Landscape Painter and
    [Show full text]
  • Artist Failures in the Fiction of Henry James
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1974 Artist Failures in the Fiction of Henry James Robert E. Terrill Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Terrill, Robert E., "Artist Failures in the Fiction of Henry James" (1974). Dissertations. 1441. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1441 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1974 Robert E. Terrill ARTIST FAILURES IN THE FICTION OF HENRY JAMES by Robert E. Terrill A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Mey 1974 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the director of the dissertation, Dr. John Gerrietts, and the members of the committee, Dr. Joseph Wolff and Dr. Martin J. Svaglic. I also acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the E. M. Cudahy.Library in obtaining materials on inter­ library loan. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. JAMES'S INTEREST IN THE FINE ARTS, ARTISTS, AND THE ISSUES OF AESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS •• 1 II. RODERICK HUDSON •• . 28 III. THE TRAGIC MUSE. • • • • • 76 IV. THE SACRED FOUNT • . 143 v. THE STORIES OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS • . 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY • .
    [Show full text]
  • Henry James's Dramatic Drama: a Critical Account1
    José Antonio Álvarez Amorós Henry James’s dramatic drama: a critical account 23 HENRY JAMES’S DRAMATIC DRAMA: A CRITICAL ACCOUNT1 José Antonio Álvarez Amorós2 Abstract: The object of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to offer a general assessment of Henry James’s dramatic drama and of the biographic and artistic motives that lie behind his efforts to write for the stage. This assessment is in part an attempt to treat his theatre as a distinct pursuit from his dramatic novel, a metaphorical description which frequently conceals or distorts James’s life-long, enthusiastic attachment to the stage. Second, it discusses the reasons –both textual and contextual– for his lack of success with critics and contemporary audiences. Key words: Henry James, nineteenth-century British drama, dramatic novel. Resumen: El propósito de este artículo es doble. Por un lado, pretende llevar a cabo una revisión general de la obra dramática de Henry James y de las motivaciones bio gráfi cas y artísticas que lo llevaron a escribir y a estrenar piezas teatrales. Esta revisión responde en parte a la necesidad de otorgar perfi les propios a dicha obra, diferenciándola de su novela dramática en tanto que deno mi na ción de carácter metafórico que a menudo oculta o distor siona la prolongada y entusiasta de dicación de James al medio escénico. Por otro lado, se analizan y valoran las ra zones –tanto tex tua les como contextuales– que explican su falta de éxito ante los críticos y el pú blico contem poráneo. Palabras clave: Henry James, teatro británico del siglo XIX, novela dramática.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry James and the Ethics of Reading Authors' Letters
    ‘No absolute privacy’: Henry James and the Ethics of Reading Authors’ Letters JAKOB STOUGAARD-NIELSEN Abstract: Authors’ private letters play a significant role in Henry James’s fiction, literary criticism and in his literary and authorial legacy. They are privileged discursive objects activating fundamental issues of privacy and publicity, canonicity and the material condition of literature. The letter is a contested discursive object in James’s work, since it is at one and the same time a potent figure for authenticity and interiority, and consequently poses a threat to the author’s desire to control his own literary corpus and his privacy. In this article, James’s personal and private investment in designing his literary testament (his private letters and his definitive collected edition) is discussed in the context of his ethical and aesthetic concerns with reading the publications of authors’ private correspondences. Contributor: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen is a Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature at University College London since 2010. He received his PhD in 2007 from University of Aarhus with a project about Henry James's New York Edition and is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Facing Authorship: Henry James and the Culture of the Book. He has recently published articles on Henry James and print culture, Hans Christian Andersen and illustrated magazines, and digital philology and cultural memory. Henry James’s career and literary afterlife display a sustained and multifaceted engagement with the changing material, cultural and literary conditions of authorship around 1900. In his own time, James took measures to manage his authorship, his own author figure, and the public’s access to his private life by, for instance, destroying his private papers and manuscripts; by asking correspondents to destroy his own letters following his own example; and by revising, selecting and designing his own literary testament in the shape of a definitive collected edition of his novels and tales (The New York Edition, 1907−1909).
    [Show full text]