Henry James

Between the publication of The Bostonians and its eventual exclusion from the New York Edition, a vexed sense of the novel's worth preponderates through James's letters. This article relates James's ambivalence toward The Bostonians to the accusations of irresponsible representation leveled at the author during the book's serialization. While seeking to illuminate the ways in which The Bostonians does provocatively contest a contemporary sense for the responsibility that fiction has towards its milieu, I propose that James's vacillation between avowing or forsaking his novel signifies a continuing fretfulness regarding this contestation.

Her current research into travel writing involves re-reading texts by Edith Wharton and Henry James as travel accounts. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (Mellen, 2006) and Literature in Context (Jate Press, 2010). Email: akovacs@lit.u-szeged.hu This paper discusses some secrets concerning Colm Tóibín and Henry James-some open secrets. The task at hand is to look into the Jamesian legacy in Brooklyn, by our mutual favourite, Colm Tóibín. Tóibín is an accomplished Jacobite both as an author (Tóibín 2004) and as a critic (Tóibín 2010), but he is also an internationally acclaimed Irish author with a serious interest in Irish issues. The essay focuses on the intersection of Jamesian features and the representation of Irishness in his Brooklyn. Brooklyn itself is a Jamesian story of a young girl moving to a new country and learning to play along new social rules, to understand di erently, a story of migration and transculturation in the 20 th century transatlantic context. One can even see it as Tóibín's version of James' transatlantic story of the innocent immigrant girl in The Portrait of a Lady. At the same time, Brooklyn is a speci cally Irish-American immigrant novel in which a young rural Irish girl goes to America for a job, gets married and, after some complications, settles. The complications involve the betrayal of her lovers and I would like to look into the use of Jamesian ambiguity in the complications of this immigrant story. The question is this: what role does Jamesian ambiguity have in the representation of the heroine's, Eilis's, immigrant experience? It appears that the use of Jamesian secrets and ambiguity in the novel enhances the uidity and socially preprogrammed nature of the immigrant experience Eilis undergoes. This position is going to be explained in three separate steps. Firstly, taking a look at the Irish-American background of the novel will clarify the speci cally moral implications of the plot. Secondly, by surveying its Jamesian themes, the Jamesian ambiguity of the story will be highlighted. Last but not least, scenes of Irish-American ambiguity will be considered which accentuate the moral implications in the novel. The way I see her, Eilis as a Jamesian character is neither a villain nor an heroine, but an immigrant who is helpless in a morally ambiguous situation. 1. IRISH-AMERICAN THEMES IN BROOKLYN Eilis Lacey, the young female protagonist of Brooklyn, leaves a dreary Ireland that o ers her no job and no boyfriend in the early 1950s. In the US she befriends a young Italian man, Tony, she rst goes to bed with and then gets married to before returning to Ireland for a visit. Back home she nds another suitor, who, oblivious to her prior ties, o ers to marry her. She is very much tempted to accept, when transatlantic Irish gossip reveals her marital status and she is obliged to ee back to the US before an impending scandal breaks out. She leaves behind her elderly widow of a mother, her disappointed suitor, and the possibility of a middle class life in Ireland-in exchange for a US working class existence. In sum, she starts out as a typical immigrant to the US: both her character and the story that evolves around her share features of previous Irish emigrant narratives. This brings the

Attached are a Table of Contents and a downloadable link for The VOICE of the CHILD in American Literature, written by MARY JANE HURST and published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1990.  The first book-length study of the child figure in American fiction, The Voice of the Child was a finalist for the Children’s Literature Association’s annual book award.

This essay focuses on Henry James’s major phase masterpiece The Wings of the Dove (1902) and on Ivan Turgenev's third novel On the Eve (1860) - a favorite of James's - discussing the similar interplay between setting and characterization in the second half of both texts.

“Knowing Maisie” describes how “we fellow witnesses,” as James deems us in the preface, corroborate the telepathic communication between Maisie and her guardians. Holmgren demonstrates that Maisie controls discourse by way of clairvoyant visions and telepathic insights rendered as proleptic events of plot; by describing her visions, the narrator unwittingly inscribes the text with a narrative Maisie authors.

At the heart of this article is a fairly straightforward assertion: that literature has a trans-verbal level at which it affects us as a work of art. Hence discussing a novel means bringing to the fore not only its overt narrative function but also its covert artistic function: a consideration of the work in light of its aesthetic intention. Following the phenomenological traditions of Roman Ingarden and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that aesthetic intention does not determine the significance of the art object, which is presumed to be dynamic within a spectrum of meanings. Rather, aesthetic intention takes into account the circumstance of the novel having been actuated into form by an " artistic gesture. " This " gesture " is not physical: it is a metaphorical motion referring to the artist's actuation of an aesthetic intention using one or another medium to give an artwork its perceivable form. In painting, this " gesture " can sometimes be traced through a work's visible brushstrokes or formal composition, but in literature such " gestures " can appear beyond the literal text and remain invisible even while they are experienced in the literary work. The conception of such a " gesture " is meant to incorporate the insights of literary and aesthetic theory, along with poststructuralism, in a critique that allows for structural analysis to also pursue a reconstituted significance. What appears below is more a program of the problem than a full treatment of its implications – a stretching of the canvas, so to speak. But I believe that the articulation of this kernel has a value in itself even if the full unraveling of the subject is yet to come.

This article examines the way in which John Banville reimagines the gothic tradition in contemporary fiction, and assesses the degree to which Henry James’s art of the ghostly tale informs the Irish writer’s rehabilitation of the gothic as a (post)modern form in Eclipse (2000). To this end, after addressing the function of boundaries in Cleave’s narrative, I move on to examine the way in which the  breaching of boundaries results in encounters with what Jacques Lacan calls ‘the Thing’. I then situate Banville’s use of the ghostly tale in a wider context by mobilising ‘disparity’ as a concept that most aptly captures the writer’s postmodern reworking of the traditional ghost story. I therefore argue that Banville reimagines a postmodern version of the gothic novel by emphasising the breaching of boundaries, uncanny encounters, and a subjective experience that lacks unity and stability.

Este trabalho faz uma análise de “Os amigos dos amigos”, de Henry James, procurando perceber como se configuram o “fantástico” e o “amor romântico” nesse conto. Para isso, as discussões sobre o “duplo” e sobre as ambiguidades jamesianas integram este trabalho ao darem sustento à
argumentação. Utilizamos a teoria de Remo Ceserani em O fantástico para a abordagem do modo fantástico e as considerações de Jorge Luis Borges, Otto Maria Capeaux, Italo Calvino e Wayne C. Booth sobre algumas as particularidades de Henry James presentes nesse conto.

Questo volume affronta la relazione tra metamorfosi del romanzo e testualità audiovisiva a partire dall’analisi di alcune tra le opere più rappresentative di quella che in ambito statunitense è stata definita Complex TV. Attraverso una critica dei finali di puntata e di serie, interpretati come indizi o sintomi di determinate caratteristiche stilistiche, Emanuela Piga Bruni individua la ripresa di temi di lunga durata e di tecniche narrative del romanzo classico in tre serie televisive di successo: Lost di J. J. Abrams, D. Lindelof, J. Lieber, C. Cuse (2004-2010), Mad Men di Matthew Weiner (2007-2015), Breaking Bad di Vince Gilligan (AMC, 2008-2013). L’autrice si interroga sulle ragioni all’origine della fortuna di queste opere: tra entrelacement e cliffhanger, intrecci vorticosi e interruzioni, contaminazioni dal cinema e delle arti visive, le serie TV contemporanee generano nuove suggestioni nell’immaginario collettivo capaci di coinvolgere un pubblico globale e transgenerazionale.

The aim of this article is to discuss The Turn of the Screw by the famous American writer Henry James in relation to the concept of the 'sublime' put forward by English thinker Edmund Burke. Having always been associated with the gothic literature, this theory of the 'sublime' can be closely related with the effects of the happenings in James' novella. The curious incidents in the story, the supernatural elements, elements of terror and obscurities make such an analysis possible. Especially, Burke's theory of the sublime can shed light on the effects of the gothic elements on the reader. The reflections of this theory on the possible effects of the story are also discussed in terms of Gothicism. In this respect, this article aims to analyze the novella in the light of Burke's definition of the sublime in many aspects.

This paper explores Henry James's engagement with the theme of American individualism in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The centrality of freedom to Isabel Archer's self image places her in the frame of the American heroine of nineteenth century fiction whose bold and free-spirited nature exemplified for America "the new nation with new freedoms" (Allen, 26). James's interest lies in examining the nature of freedom a young American girl can possess, and how the lack of knowledge about her gendered place in society leads her to take a misinformed view of the agency she possesses. Isabel subscribes to the ideology of individual "self-sufficiency" as posited by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance (1841), thereby allowing James to work with an American protagonist driven by an American ideology. The novel charts

In 1996, I published a book-length bibliographical survey of Henry James studies. 1 It was organized around three key-terms that seemed to cover a lot of work, especially of the 1980s and 1990s: style, ethics, history-and especially the intersection of the three in a new understanding of what the historical means. When asked some ten years later to discuss recent James criticism for the present volume in the context of the evolving changes within literary and American studies, I find that the trend I saw as emergent back then very quickly became dominant. That is what John Carlos Rowe has aptly summarized in the title of one of his books as our scrutiny of The Other Henry James (1998)-the Henry James who ‗is valued because his hopes and worries still speak to us', because ‗the changes we have passed through are readable historically from James and his contemporaries to us'; not the Henry James who left us a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth '. 2 James studies up to the late 1970s were by and large what we used to call ‗liberal humanist' in orientation. What we meant by that was the proclivity for deriving from James's work general lessons for ‗Man'. A good example is the common reading of ‗The Beast in the Jungle', which held that John Marcher realizes too late in life that the big life-changing event he kept on waiting for had been under his nose all along: his true love was his dear friend, May Bartram. There was always a strong moralizing thrust to such readings: James's work was indeed a ‗testament to some dubious universal truth,' as Rowe puts it; and it was an object-lesson in how characters, and by natural, self-evident extension, readers, ought to conduct their lives, then as now. James himself, for liberal humanist study, fulfilled the idealized author function: he never married, because he was too dedicated to his muse. This so-called fact was documented biographically, at length, by Leon Edel, while Adeline 2 Tintner, in a similar spirit, shed encyclopedic light on the creative process, in particular its sources in what James could have been acquainted with. 3 James studies, from around the early 1980s, heavily participated in the theoretical turn away from such universalizing and, often, in the case of literary interpretation, flattening tendencies. And it seems to me that the manipulation of the theoretical screw has, in that quarter century or so, received, not one but at least two turns, bringing us to quite uncanny heights (or depths?) of Jamesian delight.

Mit zur Emergenz literarischer Archive im 19. Jahrhundert gehört ein Buch von Henry James (1843-1916). Ursprünglich war dieses, betitelt als The Aspern Papers (in deutschen Übersetzungen: Die AspernSchriften oder Asperns Nachlass), in Fortsetzungen zwischen März und Mai 1888 in der Zeitschrift Atlantic Monthly erschienen. Für die New Yorker Gesamtausgabe seiner Werke nahm der britischamerikanische Autor ab 1906 auch an diesem Text eine Reihe sprachlicher "An spitzungen" (Blumenberg in James 2003, 207) vor. Unter anderem änderte er den Schlusssatz und korrigierte den Namen einer der beiden weib lichen Hauptfiguren von Tita auf Tina. Die Geschichte zeigt eine Welt, die von einer Krankheit befallen ist, für die man mit dem englischen Titel von Jacques Derridas Schrift Mal dʼArchive die Bezeichnung Archive Fever setzen könnte. Das Archiv erscheint in dieser Welt als ein Ort, nach dem sich ein unstillbares Begehren richtet, gleichzeitig aber ist das Archiv von innen her ständig von Vernichtung bedroht. Der namenlose Ich-Erzähler von Henry Jamesʼ Buch, ein amerikanischer Literaturwissenschaftler, ist von einem Verlangen getrieben, das sich nach dem titelgebenden Gegenstand richtet. Diese Aspern Papers sind ein Konvolut von Briefen und möglicherweise auch noch anderen Materialien, die der Forscher im Besitz einer ehemaligen Liebschaft des romantischen Dichters Jeffrey Aspern vermutet. Aspern hat um 1820 gewirkt, ist früh verstorben und hatte zahlreiche Affären. Gemeinsam mit seinem Partner John Cumnor hat der Ich-Erzähler über Aspern eine Monografie verfasst. Dem Rang nach setzen ihn die beiden mit Shakespeare gleich. Juliana Bordereau, die hochbetagte Besitzerin der Papiere, lebt gemeinsam mit Tina, von der vermutet wird, dass sie ihre Nichte oder Großnichte ist, zurückgezogen in einem heruntergekommenen Palazzo in Venedig. Cumnors Briefe an sie sind unbeantwortet geblieben. So reist der Ich-Erzähler in die Lagunenstadt und macht sich vor Ort an die beiden heran. Unter dem listigen Vorwand, insbesondere an dem Garten des Palazzo interessiert zu sein (da das Vorhandensein eines solchen in Venedig eine Seltenheit ist), verschafft er sich Zutritt zu den beiden Damen und bietet sich ihnen als Untermieter an. Bereits dieses erste Gespräch ist pure Camouflage. Es zieht und windet sich, bis Bordereau plötzlich für den gewünschten Zeitraum von drei Monaten einen horrenden und völlig Open Access. © 2021 Klaus Kastberger, publiziert von De Gruyter. Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter der Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Lizenz.

In the Cage is the tale of a London telegraphist surrendering "to a certain expansion of her consciousness", 1 and given that, as Labrie has pointed out, Henry James vies consciousness as "a highly active process of development, rather than a passive climate of awareness", 2 in place of an interpretation of the telegraphist"s situation as one of entrapment, by technology, or her own imaginative fantasies, I propose instead that the story is to be read as representing the telegraphist"s freedom with her cage. James"s narrative relates the story through her consciousness, and a suitable method for establishing my proposition, as I explore her psychology by careful attention to the representation of her consciousness in the text, is existential phenomenology.

A-t-on su samment noté que l'un des thèmes principal de La Disparition est l'herméneutique ? Encore que le roman n'en fasse pas un thème à proprement parler. Plutôt une épreuve ou une expérimentation qu'a rontent aussi bien l'écrivain, l'écriture que le lecteur. Comment le texte s'y prend-t-il ? En dé ant son propre hermétisme grâce à une e orescence de modèles du déchi rement qui empruntent à des traditions variées. Mais ceux-ci ont presque tous un point commun : se rattacher, d'une manière ou d'une autre, à la littérature. Parmi eux, trois principaux paraissent orienter les signi cations profondes du roman : le récit policier, la cryptologie et la Kabbale. Avec eux, Perec s'adonne à une activité complice de réécriture qui mobilise des oeuvres littéraires pour nous confronter à notre propre capacité à lire et à ses impasses. Dans ce maquis où s'enchevêtrent réécritures, citations, allusions et clins d'oeil, le lecteur est contraint de se faire lui-même herméneute et de se voir comme lecteur.

The purpose of this paper is to present some strategies employed by Henry James to reinforce the image of a corrupt Europe in The Portrait of a Lady. The image of a decayed, morally corrupt Europe is presented in opposition to an innocent image of America. What are some common features of this dystopia and the way the image of Europe is presented to the readers by Henry James in his novel?

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The following comparison of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and Benjamin Britten’s adaptation of this novella to the operatic stage reveals there are two oceans that are crossed: the Atlantic Ocean and the ocean of time. In spite of his life spent between the USA where he was born and where he had brother, sister, father and mother, Henry James is not English at all. This ghost story is typically American and never reaches the Gothic level British stories construct or the ironic if not sarcastic level of Oscar Wilde. It is also the time of the great debunkers of ghost stories known as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson who do not believe in ghosts but do believe in criminals and murderers and know from experience that ghosts are a good cover up for a crime, still used in many TV series.

On the other side Benjamin Britten is British to the core and ghosts cannot be ghosts because the ocean of time has been crossed along with two world wars, the two successive births of globalization. We have more or less abandoned the soul in psychiatry and we have vastly replaced it with the mind and the great masters of the mind in 1955 were Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan already and emerging fast, but not yet Michel Foucault. Each one of these set the mind in one special place of the body. For Freud the mind is in emotions and impulses. For Jung the mind is heritage from the old culture we receive with our milk after birth. For Jacques Lacan it is in the conflict and construct of two essential dimensions: the basic physiological body and the concept of authority, both in their conflict and cooperation constructing a superego he called the Phallus. Michel Foucault sets the mind at the level of the consciousness of one’s sexual apparatus, in many ways like Wilhelm Reich but with a mental dimension that Wilhelm Reich never reached, tied up and locked up in the sexual drives, both penile and anal, or vaginal and anal.

But, and that’s my main point, Benjamin Britten moves away from the ghosts to deal with mental memories or constructs that replace the parents these children do not have any more, but he refuses the innuendo Henry James invested in his novella all the time in the form of extreme sexual obsession in the nameless Governess. He brings the kids back to their ages, eight and ten, and at ten a boy needs a male model and not a male sexual partner. This model is a father substitute when the father is absent or a father extension that brings into the mental father of the boy new elements to build his superego, or Phallus to use Lacan’s concept.

And Benjamin Britten shows his deep consciousness that with any maternal figure in that situation who would be too possessive and in this particular case a power and control (sexual) freak, the boy might be mentally destroyed to the point of desiring to get out of this world back into the world where his mental model is living, since Quint is dead and not dead at the same time. Simultaneously that boy, in the most innocent way, will punish the maternal substitute who dared push him into non-existence by dying in her arms, in her lap, his big death punishing the mother-torturer-executioner who dared provoke some ripples in the field of his still unawake little death without understanding that you cannot play with that impulse even with a boy of ten without running the risk of destroying him because it is castrating if you frustrate the dim satisfaction of it and traumatic if an adult takes advantage of it to satisfy his or in this case her phantasms.

This is part of a longer study due in December on the figure of the stranger in Benjamin Britten’s operas, still six to go out of twenty-one.

The Turn of the Screw (1898) is one of the most Gothic short stories ever written by modernist author Henry James. Its effect on the reader can be quite unnerving, uncanny even. Though Sigmund Freud's essay on The Uncanny (1919h) has often been used by scholars of Gothic literature to define and explain certain thematic aspects of these stories (the double, castration anxiety, repetition compulsion, and so on), the uncanny in The Turn of the Screw goes further than the usual suspects. Rather than confining it to the eerie appearance of ghosts or the declining mental state of the tale's female narrator, the uncanny in James's complex story can be traced back to something more fundamental that is both tangible and elusive at the same time: the actual text supporting the story – or failing to do so. Reconsidering Freud's notion of the uncanny from a basic Lacanian perspective will help to explore a dark, distressing dimension of textual language that can otherwise be easily overlooked.

«Una spallata al fotografo»: il ritratto fotografico e la fotografia come scrittura. Michele Smargiassi affirmed that the novelists, who believe in the primacy of the word over the image, always try to go beyond the photographs to find hidden meanings in it. Objecting to this affirmation, on the one hand, this essay analyzes some literary works where the use of photography can be read in a me-tafictional key (see the use of fictional photographers from Hawthorne to Tournier and DeLillo). On the other hand, works whose very texture can be defined as 'photographic' are taken into account (see the use of light, cut, framing and the very poetics of authors like, for instance, Henry James and Geoff Dyer). Le immagini, per gli artigiani di parole, sono informatori indisciplinati e invadenti, assistenti di palco efficienti, ma che se non li tieni al loro posto minacciano di rubarti la scena. Le fotografie, per gli scrittori, sono stanze da attraversare senza fermarsi, ascensori in cui è vietato sedersi, per non restarci intrappolati. 1 Così scriveva Michele Smargiassi alcuni anni or sono nel suo blog, sottolineando come gli autori di narrativa, nutrendo la presunzione del primato della parola sull'immagine, si pongano in atteggiamento competitivo nei confronti della fotografia. Dopo aver rilevato che la maggior parte degli autori non vede l'immagine, ma vede solo attraverso l'immagi-ne, e cerca quindi di andare oltre la foto per individuar-ne significati reconditi che solo la parola sarebbe in gra-do di cogliere, Smargiassi concludeva: «Questi scrittori si tuffano nell'immagine fotografica dando una spallata brutale al fotografo». 2 Se questo è l'atteggiamento più comune dei romanzieri nei confronti della fotografia (e lo dimostrerebbe la famosa-per non dire famigerata-affermazione di William Saroyan secondo cui una foto vale più di mille parole solo a patto che qualcuno le pro-nunci) va tuttavia rilevato che nel corso del tempo molti scrittori hanno posto al centro dei loro romanzi, in fun-zione squisitamente metanarrativa, figure di fotografi, ovvero hanno usato la fotografia come mise en abyme non solo del testo, ma della stessa scrittura. Già nel 1851, neppure una dozzina d'anni dopo quel 1839 che vide il riconoscimento ufficiale della dagher-rotipia da parte del governo francese, negli Stati Uniti, Nathaniel Hawthorne, affidando a un dagherrotipista, Holgrave, lo scioglimento del mistero al centro del suo romanzo The House of the Seven Gables (La casa dei sette abbaini), riconosceva l'importanza della fotografia, ancora guar-data con diffidenza dai suoi contemporanei, incerti se considerarla un manufatto scien-41 n. 12, luglio-dicembre 2018

The first part of the title of this paper refers to a comment Lord Mark makes to Milly Theale, the heroine of Henry James’ novel, The Wings of the Dove. Lord Mark’s remark aptly summarizes one of the central themes of the story: exchange. Rather than purely economic transactions, exchanges occur within the context of (personal) relationships. Nobody performs a good deed without the expectation of receiving a benefit. The characters act out of self-interest instead of mutual friendship. The notable exception is Milly, who willingly shares her fortune and herself. Although Milly knows that exchange predominates among her acquaintances as a method of establishing and of maintaining relationships—indeed, as relationships—she refuses to behave similarly. Her refusal to join in this tactic becomes a powerful form of resistance. Ultimately, the mercenary tendencies of Merton Densher yield to the unselfishness he sees in Milly. This lesson prevents the pairing of Kate and Densher from succeeding.

How can we explain the origins of biofiction? Scholars suggest that the history-of-science contributed significantly to the rise of the historical novel, which exposes the way historical forces shape and determine the human. Many scholars treat the biographical novel as a form of the historical novel. But by looking at some authors of biofiction who opposed the determinism and even fatalism implicit in the history-as-science approach and its concomitant aesthetic form, the historical novel, I show how biofiction came into being as an aesthetic reaction against the historical novel. Instead of picturing the historical forces that shape and determine the human, the biographical novel gives readers a model of a figure that defies or evades environmental conditioning or cultural determinism by shaping and determining the world around him or her. In this essay, I focus on Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, and Colm Toibin.