Henry James’s Europe Heritage and Transfer Edited by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding OpenBook Publishers To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/72 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Dennis Tredy is a tenured associate professor (maître de conférences) at the University of Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing. He has published numerous articles on the works of Henry James, Truman Capote and Vladimir Nabokov, and his doctoral thesis of 2002 dealt with The ‘Innocent Reflector’ and Its Function in the Works of Henry James’s ‘Experimental Period’. His most recent studies of Henry James have dealt with the reception of James’s work in Europe, with James’s reception of English and French authors, and with film adaptations of the works of James. Annick Duperray is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at the Université of Provence (Aix-Marseille Université). She is volume editor for two of the four volumes of the critical edition of Henry James’s Nouvelles complètes (Editions Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2003). Her publications include an analytical study of Henry James’s tales, Echec et écriture : essai sur les nouvelles d’Henry James (1993) and a contribution to Henry James in Context (David McWhirter ed., Cambridge University Press, 2010). She also edited The Reception of Henry James in Europe (Continuum Books, 2006). Adrian Harding teaches Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris and American Literature at the University of Provence (Aix-Marseille). Besides poetry, his publications include Blinds, a Study of the Aesthetics of Fiction (Lebeer Hossmann, 1985) and A Survey of English Literature: the 20th Century (Dunod, 1992). He has written extensively on modern narrative, on poetics and on contemporary art, including articles on realism and narrative poetics in Henry James. His most recent book, with photographs by Alecio de Andrade and a preface by Edgar Morin, is Louvre Blinds: Le Louvre et ses visiteurs (Le Passage, 2009). Henry James’s Europe: Heritage and Transfer Edited by Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding Cambridge 2011 Open Book Publishers CIC Ltd., 40 Devonshire Road, Cambridge, CB1 2BL, United Kingdom http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2011 Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding Some rights are reserved. This book and digital material are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Details of allowances and restrictions are available at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com As with all Open Book Publishers titles, digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product.php/72 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-906924-37-9 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-906924-36-2 ISBN Digital (pdf): 978-1-906924-38-6 Cover photo: Henry James in the garden by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Used with the permission of the George Eastman House, Rutherford. All rights reserved. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers Contents Page Contributors viii Preface xiii Dennis Tredy On ‘The European Society of Jamesian Studies’ xxiii Adrian Harding I: Ethics and Aesthetics 1. Henry James on Opening the Door to the Devil 3 Jean Gooder 2. From Romance to Redemption: James and the Ethics of 17 Globalization Roxana Oltean 3. James’s Sociology of Taste: The Ambassadors, Commodity Consumption and Cultural Critique 39 Esther Sánchez -Pardo 4. Bad Investments 51 Eric Savoy II: French and Italian Hours 5. ‘The Crash of Civilization’: James and the Idea of France, 1914-15 61 Hazel Hutchison 6. The Citizens of Babylon and the Imperial Imperative: Henry James’s Modern Parisian Women 71 Claire Garcia 7. French as the Fantasmal Idiom of Truth in What Maisie Knew 81 Agnès Derail-Imbert 8. Figures of Fulfilment: James and ‘a Sense of Italy’ 93 Jacek Guthorow 9. The Aspern Papers: From Florence to an Intertexual City, Venice 103 Rosella Mamoli Zorzi 10. The Wavering Ruins of The American 113 Enrico Botta vi Henry James’s Europe III: Appropriating European Thematics 11. Balzacian Intertextuality and Jamesian Autobiography in The 123 Ambassadors Kathleen Lawrence 12. A Discordance Between the Self and the World: The Collector in Balzac’s Cousin Pons and James’s ‘Adina’ 137 Simone Francescato 13. The ‘déjà vu’ in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ 147 Max Duperray IV: Allusion 14. Some Allusions in the Early Stories 157 Angus Wrenn 15. C’est strictement confidentiel: Buried Allusions in Confidence(1879) 169 Rebekah Scott 16. James and the Habit of Allusion 179 Oliver Herford V: Performance 17. The Absent Writer in The Tragic Muse 193 Nelly Valtat-Comet 18. James and the ‘Paradox of the Comedian’ 203 Richard Anker 19. Benjamin Britten’s Appropriation of James in Owen Wingrave 215 Hubert Teyssandier VI: Authorship and Self-Representation 20. Narrative Heterogeneity as an Adjustable Fictional Lens in The American Scene 229 Eleftheria Arapoglou 21. James’s Faces: Appearance, Absorption and the Aesthetic Significance of the Face 237 Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen 22. From Copying to Revision: The American to The Ambassadors 247 Paula Marantz Cohen 23. Friction with the Publishers, or How James Manipulated his Editors in the Early 1870’s 255 Pierre A. Walker 24. Losing Oneself: Autobiography, Memory, Vision 263 John Holland Bibliography of Works Cited 273 Index 287 Contents vii Supplemental chapters available on-line at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product.php/72 Introduction s5 Dennis Tredy Contributors s8 I. Re-Readings and Re-Workings of the International Theme s10 1. Tourist Attractions, Stereotypes and Physiognomies in s11 The American H. K. Riikonen 2. ‘Haunting and Penetrating the City’: The Influence of Emile s20 Zola’s L’Assommoir on James’s The Princess Casamassima David Davies 3. The Mother as Artist in “Louisa Pallant”: Re-casting the s29 International Scene Larry A. Gray 4. James’s Romantic Promises: The Golden Bowl and the Virtual s38 Leman Giresunlu II. Beyond Biography s47 5. Father and Son: The Divided Self in James’s Notes of a Son s48 and Brother Mhairi Pooler 6. “Fond Calculations”: The Triumph of James’s Mathematical s56 Failure Isobel Waters 7. A Multiplicity of Folds of an Unconscious ‘Crystal’ Monad: s68 James, Benjamin, and Blanchot Erik S. Roraback 8. “Life after Death”: James and Postmodern Biofiction s78 Madeleine Danova Bibliography of Works Cited s86 Contributors Richard Anker is a tenured Associate Professor (maître de conférences) at Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand 2, where he teaches American literature. He defended a thesis on James in 2007 entitled Le principe spectral de la representation: Déconstruction mimétique dans l’oeuvre de Henry James. His current interest in James attempts to situate the author in the European cultural tradition, alongside such writers as Nietzsche and as a precursor to Blanchot. Eleftheria Arapoglou received her B.A. in English from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1995. She completed her M.A. as a Fulbright grantee at the University of Texas at San Antonio, U.S., in 1998 and her PhD in 2005 at Aristotle University. Currently, she is an adjunct member of faculty in the Department of American Literature and Culture of Aristotle University. She has co-edited two volumes—Transcultural Localisms (2006); [City in (Culture] in City) (2005)—and a special issue of the journal Gramma entitled Comparative Literature and Global Studies: Histories and Trajectories (2005). She recently completed her book A Bridge Over the Balkans: Demetra Vaka Brown and the Tradition of Women’s Orients, which is forthcoming from Gorgias Press. Her research interests include the cultural production of space in the modernist tradition, literary sociology, and cultural studies. Enrico Botta is a PhD student in Literary Genres at the University of L’Aquila, Italy. Botta is currently writing his doctoral thesis on nineteenth-century American epics—in particular on the relationship between the epic mode and the International Theme. He has published his essay “Transatlantic Intertextuality in The American” in the volume Revisionary Interventions into Henry James (2008) and has presented his research, ‘From Barlow to James: Some Epic Features’, at Dartmouth College. Agnès Derail-Imbert is a tenured Associate Professor (maître de conférences) at the ENS-Ulm and at the Sorbonne (Paris IV) in Paris. In 2000 she published Moby-Dick, allures du corps. She also co-edited and co-translated Melville: Derniers poèmes (2010). She has written numerous articles on nineteenth- century American literature. Contributors ix Max Duperray, professor of English studies at the University of Provence, is a specialist in Gothic fiction. In the last ten years, his main publications have been Lecture de Frankenstein (1997); Le roman anglais dit gothique (2000); La Folie et la méthode : essai sur la déréalisation en littérature(2001); Confessions by Thomas de Quincey (2003); Londres : promenade sous un ciel couvert (2005); “In a Glass Darkly: Reflexions of a Gothic Past,” in The Remains of the Gothic (Caliban 15/ 2004), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (2005). He has recently edited Eclats du noir: généricité et hybridation dans la littérature et le cinéma anglophone (2008) and Gothic News: Exploring the Gothic in Relation to New Critical Perspectives and Geographic Polarities (2009). Simone Francescato earned his PhD from the Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice (Italy).