Download Free Henry James Letters Volume 1 1843 1875 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Henry James Letters Volume 1 1843 1875 and write the review.

“A dignified and impressive addition to your bookshelf that reveals James’s virtuoso performance in a genre he helped to define, refine and elevate.” — The Commercial Appeal This Library of America volume, the first of five of Henry James’s short fiction, brings together his first twenty-four published stories, thirteen never collected by James. Encompassing a wide range of subjects, settings, and formal techniques, they show the first explorations of some of James’s most significant themes: the force of social convention and the compromises it demands; the complex and often ambiguous encounter between Europe and America; the energies of passion measured against the rigors of artistic discipline. By his mid-twenties, James was a regular contributor to the most prestigious and popular magazines of his era. He is equally at ease writing historical tales, such as “Gabrielle de Bergerac,” a love story set in pre-Revolutionary France, as he is exploring contemporary events, as in the three stories that treat the effects of the American Civil War on civilians. James’s psychological acuity is already evident in “Master Eustace,” a study of the ruthlessness of a spoiled child, and in “Guest’s Confession,” where the comic portrayal of an arrogant businessman hints at his cruelty and self-absorption. In “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” and “The Last of the Valerii,” James begins to work with the supernatural and fantastic motifs that would continue to surface in his work. Early examples of James’s lifelong fascination with art and artists include “A Landscape Painter,” about a young painter’s attraction to a seemingly simple family living in a desolate coastal town, and “The Madonna of the Future,” where an aging artist avoids the unveiling of his masterpiece. Adumbrating later triumphs and compelling in their own right, these stories reveal and accomplished and cosmopolitan young talent mastering the art of the short story. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The third volume of Leon Edel's superb edition of Henry James's letters finds the novelist settled in Europe and his expatriation complete. The letters of this time reflect the growth of James's literary and personal friendships and introduce the reader to the frescoed palazzos, Palladian villas, and great estates of the Roseberys, the Rothschilds, the Bostonian-Venetian Curtises, and the Florentine-American Boott circle. In all his travels, James closely observes the social scene and the dilemmas of the human beings within it. During this fruitful period he writes The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, and some thirty-five of his finest international tales. Undermining his success, however, are a devastating series of disappointments. Financial insecurity, an almost paraniod defensiveness following the utter failure of his dramatic efforts, and the deaths of his sister, his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, and his ardent admirer Constance Fenimore Woolson all combine to take him to what he recognizes is the edge of an abyss of personal tragedy. And yet James endures, and throughtout these trials his letters reveal the flourish, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the social insight that marked his genius. As Edel writes in his Introduction: "The grand style is there, the amusement at the vanities of this world, the insistence that the great ones of the earth lack the imagination he is called upon to supply, and then his boundless affection and empathy for those who have shown him warmth and feeling." In an appendix Mr. Edel presents four remarkable unpublished letters from Miss Woolson to James. These throw light on their ambiguous relationship and on James's feelings of guilt and shock after her suicide in Venice.
This study of Henry James's biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Wetmore Story offers an argument that he deserves greater recognition for his contributions to the development of biography, based on his implicit theory of biography, found in his critical commentary and on these two complicated and ultimately artistically innovative performances in the genre. Although James maintained an ambivalent relationship to the art of biography, in his reviews, criticism, letters and fiction, he wrote about biography from a core of aesthetic conviction that constitutes an informal poetics. It is necessary thus to scrutinize the ways in which James's theoretical convictions, particularly his insistence on artistic unity, fail him when he writes two biographies himself. Both Hawthorne (1879) and William Wetmore Story and His Friends(1903) fail to cohere in the way traditional biographies achieve unity. Neither work has at its center a dynamic and fully dimensional apprehension of the biographical subject. Instead James violates one of his own essential biographical tenets. He usurps his subject and places himself at the center of what should be a narrative of his subject's life. The results fall short of fully achieved biography, but they do not fall short of literary interest. In order to write these books according to his own genius, James had to reinvent the form. They are rife with innovations, chief among them his great experimentation with narrative point of view, here brought to bear on biography. This concept and others survey the terrain for the important biographical practitioners and theorists who follow him. For this reason, a special place must be found for James in pantheon of experimental biographers.
This new volume in the Author Chronology series offers an intense articulation of Henry James's biographical experiences, which are presented amid the detailed unfolding of his imaginative writing, and set in the larger context of historical developments that impinged upon his life. Evoking the wide range of his experiences with other human beings, his manifold studies of fellow artists in various fields, and his critical articulation of the art of writing fiction, this study reveals his major influence upon subsequent writers and students of fiction.
In Henry James and Queer Modernity, first published in 2003, Eric Haralson examines far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality as depicted in the writings of Henry James and three authors who were greatly influenced by him: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Haralson places emphasis on American masculinity as portrayed in fiction between 1875 and 1935, but the book also treats events in England, such as the Oscar Wilde trials, that had a major effect on American literature. He traces James's engagement with sexual politics from his first novels of the 1870s to his 'major phase' at the turn of the century. The second section of this study measures James's extraordinary impact on Cather's representation of 'queer' characters, Stein's theories of writing and authorship as a mode of resistance to modern sexual regulation, and Hemingway's very self-constitution as a manly American author.
Employing a wide range of interpretive and theoretical approaches, this collection brings together distinguished James scholars from four continents to elicit new and exciting readings of a diverse array of James’s fiction and non-fiction. Through their transformative acts, the essays investigate James’s life-long engagement with cities, places, and tourist sites; offer theoretically informed readings of his work’s textual richness; and explore his intricate involvement with social and cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, economics, friendship and hospitality, and visual culture. Arranged under rubrics which signal the complex interrelations of Henry James as a historical individual and of the works he authored with a web of social, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses, the contributions collected in this book make a convincing case for the ongoing productivity of James’s oeuvre when interrogated from new critical angles and, therefore, for its enduring centrality to the concerns of literary and cultural studies.
The first book devoted to the literary relationship between Henry James and his American predecessor, Nathaniel Hwthorne. Robert Emmet Long demonstrates James' transformation of Hawthorne's romantic forms into realism, as one of the significant features of James' early career. Long shows that Hawthorne provided James ith a native tradition having its own conceptions of American psychological experience.
A discussion of Henry James and other utopian writers (Charlotte Perkins, Gilman, Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells) and how the commercial and territorial expansion of the U.S. prompted these utopians to imagine a universal culture standing at the
A natural and social history of the great river of Rome