Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers and Their Work) - Softcover

Hardy, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0746307489 ISBN 13: 9780746307489

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Barbara Hardy has concentrated on the late period from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, The Jolly Corner and other tales, autobiography, travel and the influential criticism. She has been writing about James since the fifties and draws on long experience of teaching James - to addicts, hostile parodists, and persevering fiction-lovers fascinated by a demandingly extravagant and original novelist. She offers new readings of the major novels, and revaluation of the literary criticism in the context of later ideas, which James's theory and practice anticipate. Her close analysis traces generative imaging-making and reflexive story-telling, following two dominant and complementary themes, the social construction of character, and creative imagination: James dramatises the power of environment, to dismiss essentialism and ask the key question `What shall we call the self?'; and he is a disturbing analyst of inner life, catching its fantasies, revisions, and speculations in self-referential language. This study of the most innovative of Victorian and Edwardian novelists will interest new and old Jamesians, novel-readers and students at all levels.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Most innovative of Victorian and Edwardian novelists, James transformed fiction by anti-realist modes of symbolic action, puzzles, gaps, and narrative uncertainties, devices emphasized in his own and later theory. In this original and accessible study Barbara Hardy concentrates on the late period from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, 'The Jolly Corner' and other tales, autobiography, travel, and the influential criticism. She offers new interpretations of the major novels, and revaluation of the literary criticism in the context of later ideas, which James's theory and practice anticipate. James's art is read as 'writerly' narrative, whose riddles are fun, whose language is wit, whose sexuality is passionate and whose sexual politics and sense of history are radical.

About the Author:

Barbara Hardy is professor emeritus in the University of London, Birkbeck, and honorary professor in the University of Wales, Swansea. Among her many books are The Novels of George Eliot (1959), The Appropriate Form (1964), The Moral Art of Dickens (1970), A Reading of Jane Austen (1975), Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (1982), Charles Dickens: A Writers and their Work Special (1985), Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction (1985). She is working on a book about Shakespeare's narrative and a collection of essays on Thomas Hardy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0746307489
• ISBN 13: 9780746307489
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112