Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity - Hardcover

Posnock, Ross

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195066065 ISBN 13: 9780195066067

Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr, 1991

Synopsis

In this important revisionist study, Posnock integrates literary and psychological criticism with social and cultural theory to make a major advance in our understanding of the life and thought of two great American figures, Henry and William James. Challenging canonical images of both brothers, Posnock is the first to place them in a rich web of cultural and intellectual affiliations comprised of a host of American and European theorists of modernity. A startling new Henry James emerges from a cross - disciplinary dialogue, which features Veblen, Suntan, Bourn, and Dewey, as well as Weber, Simmer, Benjamin, and Adorn. While contributing to current debates about the responsibility of the intellectual, Posnock's work will fascinate the general reader as well as literary and cultural critics and historians.

About this title

Review:

"An altogether worthwhile, serious, and original approach to the Jameses."―Choice

"An erudite and engaging book....[A] remarkable achievement. Posnock...reminds us that our conceptual experience of modernity owes as much to Henry James as to his brother."―Journal of American History

"A brilliant study―a remarkable synthesis of cultural history, close reading, and theoretical speculation. It will make an important contribution to James studies, and an equally significant contribution to our understanding of American culture, to debates on modernity, and to discussions of the possibilities and problems of cultural criticism itself."―Jonathan Freedman, Yale University

"This is a major work of criticism, a...brilliant reconfiguration of literary culture and of literary modernism at the turn into the 20th century, and it offers some of the best interpretations I have ever read of Henry and William James, and of many attendant figures like Howard Sturgis, Santayana, and Adorno."―Richard Poirier, Rutgers University

"Posnock manages to provide an intellectual as well as an ideological context for the challenge of modernity. The result is a rich mosaic of quotations and commentary, inlaid with diverse elements from psychology, fiction, philosophy, literary history, autobiography, and cultural theory."―American Literature

"...An erudite and engaging book...Remarkable achievment...Reminds us that our conceptual experiences of modernity owes as much to Henry James as to his brother."―The Journal of American History

Synopsis:

This manuscript integrates literary and biographical criticism with social and cultural theory to further our understanding of the life of two of America's most luminous intellectual figures. A central premise is that to contextualize the novelist inevitably involves assessing his relationship with his elder brother, William. The study moves discussion from the strictly psychological approach to a more dynamic, dialectical perspective that reveals how the psychological and cultural components of the Henry/William relation reciprocally interact. Exploring what Henry calls his "rare curiosity" permits us to challenge the neat dualisms - active, manly William, contemplative, sissified Henry - that continue to structure accounts of their relation. Posnock's book unsettles this binary configuration by recovering curiosity as a third term that describes behaviour as a dialectic of activity and passibity. It aims to offer a new way to think about the relation of the brothers to each other and to their larger cultural moment: the challenge and trauma of early 20th-century modernity.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0195066065
• ISBN 13: 9780195066067
• Binding: Hardcover