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During the long nineteenth century, Western publics experienced the invention and proliferation of commercial games for children. Card games, board games, and other parlor games were no longer for adults only; these new offerings formalized some aspects of what it meant for a child to engage in play. Many games centered travel, becoming sites for children to simulate adult agency in movement through space. This paper examines the stories told by narrative card games and board games about travel, especially travel within and between urban centers. The games present the city as microcosm of the world. Child players are invited to construct multiple national and ethnic identities as they pretend to be city travelers. The games attempt to teach children, and their caregivers, how to travel. I argue that the structures and aims of the games evolve over time, keeping pace with new mores surrounding work and leisure travel. I also argue for connections between games and the "set moves" of narrative fiction and theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by a blend of narrativity studies and cognitive narrative theory, and based on an updated conception of the epistemic plot, this paper sets out to investigate how fictional cognition propels narrative progression from the earliest compositional stages of Henry James's tales as documented in his notebook synopses. Placed in a wider context, moreover, and given James's conviction of the storyness of the representation of consciousness, this paper also invites debate on his role as a remote harbinger of the narrativity of the mind, so characteristic of contemporary cognitive approaches to the fictional genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Might the pre-revolutionary setting of Boston, as depicted in Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," relate to high-society Paris in James's The Ambassadors? What do the nepotistic outlooks of Robin Molineux and Lambert Strether have in common? How does the narrative technique of Hawthorne's tale anticipate the artistry of one of James's most complex narratives, and in what manner does James go beyond his predecessor in refining the reflector-narrator technique? The magnitude and significance of such concerns—although in Hawthorne's tale, historically momentous; in James's narrative, highly personal—stand to enhance understanding of how James enhanced the narrative technique of "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" in dramatic renderings of apperceptive consciousness and post-factum narrative speculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this essay, I examine how, in Emma, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who unite a precarious relationship to the British gentry with a talent for conversation. I argue that, through this glorification of their heroines' eloquence, Austen, Eliot, and James align this socioeconomic positionality--what I term "precarious affluence" or "gentry-adjacence"-- with novelistic protagonicity. Through this analysis, I study the differing degrees to which these three major nineteenth-century novelists use their smooth-talking heroines to imagine an emerging, alternative elite to the gentry and the aristocratic upper classes. Ultimately, the article suggests that, as the nineteenth century progresses, Eliot and James begin to give increasing credence to the possibility that a monied class distinct from the aristocracy and gentry could offer unique powers and freedoms to its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Fabrica Litterarum Polono-Italica is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This narrative inquiry explores the author's attempt to teach Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw in a high school English class, making the celebration of confusion – in the tradition of John Dewey – the cornerstone of the experience. The students' interpretive discourse is analysed, prompting reflection on promising approaches, opportunities, and challenges connected with teaching difficult literary texts in high school and introductory college courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry James's four references to his short story "The Story in It" (1902) in his notebook entries reveal his keen interest in the story of an honest woman. In Maud Blessingbourne's intense disputes with Mrs. Dyott and Colonel Voyt on the nature of a "story," the definition of "relation," and the absence of decent women characters in European fiction, Blessingbourne's righteousness, sincerity, and tolerance are highlighted. The paper contends that James advocates the importance of abiding by the aesthetic principle of freedom based on sincerity in fiction writing in response to Walter Besant's emphasis on the consumptive nature of "story". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates the gendered practice of taking a walk in two works of Henry James, his early success Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) and his later-phase masterpiece The Wings of the Dove (1902). We focus on James's women protagonists, the titular Daisy Miller and Wings ' Milly Theale and, specifically, their desire to walk unhindered through the European cities they are visiting, Rome and London, respectively. The simple activity of going for a walk in an unknown city, this essay argues, points beyond the scope of the streets traversed; it becomes a practice of self-assertion. Both narratives draw on the deep-seated connotations of transgression and deviance with which travelling women have long been associated. We begin by addressing travel as transgression and look at the cultural-historical context of women travellers in which James places his heroines. Our major objective is to map the ways in which James's treatment of the woman pedestrian has changed over the decades between the two works. To this end, we explore the gender-determined restrictions to mobility in the two case studies and bring out the pleasure that both protagonists derive from bypassing those restraints, the pleasure of travelling and walking freely, in their own distinct ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the British colonists blessed tiger hunting as the cardinal "royal" sport of the Haut monde, a surge of interest took place among the leisure class to travel to the British Raj in order to re-practice their ancestral fox hunting on foreign hunting grounds—this time with a more fearsome quarry. Since tigers were considered exotic and fierce creatures, overpowering these beasts secured a certain cachet for the victor, signifying his virility and manliness. As a result, the encounter between man and the tiger—both in the metaphoric and non-metaphoric sense—provided a literary trope for the twentieth-century writers who associated the animal with the erotic hunger of the male protagonists. By studying the traditional beliefs surrounding these mystical creatures, the present article reads some of the notable literary fictions of the twentieth century that use the tiger as a central animal motif— The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Death in Venice (1912), and The Remains of the Day (1989)—in light of each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article adopts a contrastive perspective to the study of intertextual references found in Henry James's novella Daisy Miller (1878) and its two Polish translations by Jadwiga Olędzka (1961) and Magdalena Moltzan-Małkowska (2013). The aim is to identify selected traces of intertextuality included in the source text and analyse how they have been dealt with by each translator in the process of establishing a new intertextual relationship, namely, that between the original and its translation. Assuming that texts do not exist in a vacuum, but are rather propelled by other (con)textual units, the question is whether and to what extent the intertextual tropes enriching the artistic significance of the novella are available and understandable to the reader of its Polish translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As philosophers with many theoretical books at our fingertips, we can find additional illustrations of human life as lived on a deeper, moral level. Henry James, a master at describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, along with their moral dilemmas, is one very good place to start. Throughout his short stories and novels, he illustrates how, even though we might wish to make it otherwise, life is not an illusion. We wake up to it every day. We can forget or deny it, or we can welcome our experiences as they come and give them what they demand. His works are passionate pleas for the fullest possible human development, one unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity and informed by enlightened morality, enable us to envision better what life fully lived might look like, and to see the sense of striving for it ourselves. After introducing the audience to the life, works, and philosophy of Henry James, I will present instances in which my work with clients was informed and enhanced by them. Three cases will be interwoven with stories of the ways in which his works and thoughts enriched my thinking and improved my ability to reflect upon some of the moral dilemmas involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Escritos is the property of Escritos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The essay is a reflection on the possibility of diverse interpretations of both works - The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and the stage work of the same title composed by Benjamin Britten. The text is divided into six parts, the introduction is placed first. The author forms the thesis that depending on external conditions, the experiences of the viewer, everyone can interpret the novella in a different way. On the basis of her own reflections and references to considerations and analyses made by other scholars, she describes the various interpretative possibilities of the work. In his reflections, he refers not only to the textual, stage and acting layers, but also to the musical means used by Britten. The ambiguity of events, behavior and emotions of the characters make the plot full of insinuations. The unreliability of the narrator does not allow an objective assessment of the events described. The author also refers to social and cultural issues related to the era in which the action of the work is set, as well as the psychology of the characters. The author of the essay suggests that the literary work described is a kind of psychological game conducted by the writer for the recipient of the work. He does not give clear answers to the questions that bother the reader. Also, Britten's opera is not, as the author of the libretto emphasizes, an attempt to interpret the original, but to transfer the story created by James to the musical ground. The question of the correct interpretation of the work remains without a concrete answer, because everyone turns the screw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, when the late novels of Henry James became a touchstone for the ethical turn in literary criticism, ethical critics of different persuasions, such as Martha Nussbaum and J. Hillis Miller, homed in on certain complex terms and ambiguous avowals in James's prose in their efforts to hold him up as an 'exemplary' writer, committed to 'ethical' values such as particularity and singularity. In doing so, these critics overlooked the prospect that at this point in his career James was testing a new sort of literary abstractionism. Like painterly abstraction, literary abstraction makes room for the material and the particular at the same time as it denies them. To illustrate this, I examine a cluster of Jamesian keywords – 'do/doing/done' – from The Golden Bowl (1904) and elsewhere, to dispute the view that James systematically shuns abstraction. Instead, I propose that abstraction – depending for its effect on absorption, entanglement, and bewilderment – be read not as a withdrawal from life into 'the vague', cerebral, imaginary, or purely aesthetic realm, but a move to create deep involvements between characters and between readers and texts, and as such should be regarded as a central motivation of James's evasive late style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new account of masochism, retheorising it in terms of both gender and artistic practice through a reading of Henry James's 'Nona Vincent' (1892). In this story, theatre structures a mode of pleasure that explodes the gendered division of artistic labour whereby women inspire and men 'do'. This feminising fantasy of authorship responds to the scandals spawned by performances of Ibsen's 'women's plays' in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inscribed in the field of cognitive narrative theory, this paper asks, and attempts to answer, a number of questions about the early emergence of mind in James's notebook material for his short fiction. These questions essentially turn on the metarepresentational and aspectualizing potential of notebook entries in genetic relation to the finished tales, that is, on their capacity to present the projected storyworld, from its very conception, as a function of the subjectivity of one or several characters in the cognitive role of metarepresentational sources, or else as a dementalised lump of content to be aspectualised later in the process of execution. Analysis of the relevant notebook material yields a polarity between epistemic and contentual entries, and reveals a set of cognitive phenomena based on the alteration or continuity of the primitive balance of sources which allows one to conclude that James's characteristic concern with the mental dynamics of his narratives, rather than being a compositional addition, was deeply embedded in his earliest fictional projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry James is recognised as a major literary influence on modernism as it developed in Great Britain and the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet in the increasingly politicised writings of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, James stood for far more than literary experimentation. In Pound's writings, the novelist figured as an author peculiarly sensitive to notions of race and cultural integrity. In this essay, I explore Pound's creation of a 'Fascist' James, one whose battles on behalf of 'civilisation' came increasingly to signify for Pound a narrow, culturally exclusive and authoritarian world. By the late 1930s, James featured in Pound's Italian journalism as an ideal author for his 'Fascist Library'. With readings of Pound's early writings on James alongside in-depth analyses of the Pisan Cantos (1948), I argue that James's fictions of encounter between America and Europe became key to Pound's later vision of culture – a vision increasingly marked by its emphasis on the cultural and racial unity of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A capacity for vicarious experience is one of Lambert Strether's most celebrated characteristics, apparent not only in his famous injunction to Little Bilham to "live all you can," but also in his more general attitude toward Chad Newsome's life in Paris, which he proposes, at one point, to regard as a substitute for his own youth. This incorrigible tendency to live his life through the experiences of others might seem to conflict with the goals of Bildung or aesthetic education, since, if nothing else, the experiences that constitute such an education ought surely to be one's own. But although the bildungsroman as a genre is often thought to be concerned with the formation of an individual subject, the concept of Bildung articulated by Goethe and hisWeimar associates in the 1790s in fact assigns a particular importance to the idea of vicarious experience. In the archetypal bildungsroman, for instance, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Wilhelm's education is not complete until he can see himself as a "representative of the species," in Schiller's phrase, and thus seek consolation for his own limitations in the achievements of other human beings. In this perspective, James's portrait of a "man of imagination" whose education consists in imagining the experiences of others is not a deviation from the tradition of the bildungsroman but a realization of one of the genre's originary possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that James gives us a version of individualism through the aesthetic that ultimately relies on a privileged solitary regard for existence. What James describes in his own life as the 'essential loneliness of my life' is the 'essential ground' to his rendering of what he calls the 'inward life' and its 'more intimate education'. James still offers us today important lessons for education in an age that, as Michael D. Higgins argues, is devoted to individualism and competition. He grants the reader both private moments of 'dawdling' and a philosophy of artistic practice where the solitary reflection on beauty allows us to re-evaluate isolation and loneliness as entry points into the contemplation of the beautiful as a ground for education. It reminds us to allow students to come to terms with their loneliness as an emotion that grants them states of mindfulness and reflection that can then enable them to work out what are the reasons for their likes and dislikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of telegraphy and diction in Henry James' "In the Cage," a novella about language. Topics discussed include the appearance of the language of measurement in the introduction to the telegraphist and her work, the language describing the telegraphist's fiancée, Mr. Mudge, and symbolism of the telegram.

Copyright of Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using notions such as aspectuality, metarepresentation, extended cognition, and distributed identity, which were first developed by cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind and later adapted to the study of fictional consciousness by cognitive narratology, this paper explores the social construction of Flora Saunt's identity in Henry James's 'Glasses' (1896). This short story is a fine specimen of a group of first-person Jamesian narratives which could be summarily characterised as tales of absent or effaced protagonists for the simple reason that their alleged central figures are seldom, if ever, directly available to the reader and mostly exist as sets of consensual or conflicted images lodged in the minds of other inhabitants of the storyworld. In the specific case of 'Glasses', for instance, an analysis of its cognitive make-up provides sufficient evidence to conclude that the construction of Flora as a vain, deceitful woman is heavily contingent on the gender peculiarities of the sources that represent and metarepresent her mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the conflict of cultures in James' fiction which is usually dramatized by a typical innocent American who is confronted by characters who represent sophisticated and somewhat crippling European traditions. This does not imply that James is against the observance of social manners. The heroine in Daisy Miller is condemned for being openly a flirt and she dies symbolizing her inability to adapt to European social standards. James is only against dogmatizing social conventions to the extent of restricting the freedom of individuals. Christopher Newman in The American retreats to America avoiding the evil and sophisticated Bellegardes in Paris without compromising his integrity. However, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady stands the challenge posed by European tradition. She is able to maintain her goodness and confront a world dominated by conventions and evil, although the price is quite high: it is her happiness and spontaneity that she has compromised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines immigrant perceptions and constructions of the past in Victorian Britain. It takes into account memorial practices and historical discourses from across a range of national, political and professional backgrounds, in order to highlight the points of conjunction between communities and cultural figures rarely, if ever, brought together in Victorian scholarship. To do this, it adopts a dual methodology, combining historical and biographical overviews drawn from different disciplinary areas with close attention to primary textual examples. Case studies of European revolutionaries such as Alexander Herzen, Peter Kropotkin and Karl Marx, and American expatriate authors such as Henry James and Mark Twain, are thus situated in a broader analysis of the production and consumption of private and public histories, inflected by considerations of ideology, degrees of integration and types of relation to the 'host' society. The foreigners who found themselves on British soil in the Victorian period created a web of relationships with memory and history, and only by engaging with the breadth and variety, as well as the specificity, of those relationships, can we begin to unravel the web's complexity. The essay takes the 'global turn' in Victorian studies in a different direction, and may be read as the first step towards a new theory of the Victorian immigrant experience of the past, based on an interrogation of the memory/history binary itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by cognitive narratology and specifically based on our metarepresentational ability, this paper explores how the subjectivity in Henry James's tales is transferred to the summaries provided by critics for the orientation of readers. Since it enables real, and realistic, minds to process content along with sources and paths of propagation, the metarepresentational skill proves to be an essential instrument for discriminating in narrative texts the authenticated, source-free facts from those which are contingent on the subjective domains of characters and character-narrators. When for a number of reasons this skill is relaxed or altogether deactivated in the act of summarizing, the resulting product will betray the original work by projecting a distorted or reductive image of it, particularly in a writer like James who was increasingly concerned with imparting informational verisimilitude to his fiction. The treatment of metarepresentational sources in the summaries of James's tales generates perplexing patterns, such as when the handling of sources in a summary contradicts the critic's own conclusions elsewhere in his or her work. This clash yields insights into the authenticating function of the fictional text in connection with its cognitive rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary fiction is a widely popular arena in which discourse on sexuality and queerness is produced and disseminated. The Gothic is an especially crucial mode in literary fiction that has a historically intimate relationship with queer subjectivity. Observing this relationship between Gothic fiction and queer subjectivity, in this article I analyze the representation of queer Gothic girlhood in contemporary fiction, taking as my focus John Harding's 2010 reworking of the Henry James classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898). I show how Florence and Giles develops familiar tropes attached to the figure of the queer child and look specifically at how readings of the parent text implicate contemporary readings of this figure. With close readings that draw on the queer feminist ethics of Lynne Huffer, I consider what seems to be happening to the figure of the queer Gothic girl in contemporary fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is on the Venetian essays of Henry James's travelogue Italian Hours. Although critics of James, as well as the writer himself, have relegated his travel writings to the margins of his canon, this article reconsiders James's travel writing as a literary cartography, a primary site in which the author is actively theorizing his concept of the "direct, artistic impression." A central argument is that the Jamesian impression is structurally and functionally similar to a hologram, a three-dimensional, extrarepresentational form that affords James's map of Venice its unique ability to capture fleeting moments, point-of-contact experience, and the immediacy of wonder. A rhizomatic organizing pattern allows James's literary cartography to function as a true hologram and enables the text to chart impressionist potentialities of Venice rather than geographic certainties, favoring obscurity over cartographic clarity. Subverting traditional cartographic practice of the nineteenth century, James's map of Venice defamiliarizes landmarks, disorients the reader, and converts known space back into an ill-defined state. A geocritical approach allows the Jamesian impression to be read as both an observed state of wonder and a self-expressive textual subject, a performance of a new space rather than a representation of one known. Thus, James's impressions are not static representations of place but rather emergent processes, allowing the travelogues to be read as a type of critical human geography where the boundaries between material space and acts of representation are blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Print literature has always existed in an ecosystem of media forms, among which the attention of audiences have been shared. Periodically, however, novelists have expressed concerns for the charms of literature in relation to its competitors. This article explores three interrelated experiments that harness the effects of authorial presence to revive the capacity of literary fiction to detain readers. Henry James's 'The Death of the Lion' (1894), Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers (2015) speak to each other by mobilising the trope of the author in ways that probe the fault lines in under-nuanced accounts of the author's coercive role in delimiting the meaning of a literary work. These texts, I offer, reimagine the author not as a disciplining force but as a compelling figure, working in distinctive ways to summon readerly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Present study entitled "Henry James's Art of Employing Imagery: A Study" is to explore Henry James' use of art objects and art imaginary in the delineation of characters. This research also examines how Henry James finds analogy between the art of the Painter and the art of the novelist in his attempt to represent life. The purpose of this study is to delineate how James' use of images and his art of technique is presented in his works. James uses art imagery and art objects to underline his themes. In his works the sight of art and its insight merge as an organic unity of his works. This paper also elucidates how James establishes a balance between real and "romantic". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry James, in his novel The Portrait of a Lady, builds a world around a main character who temperamentally and then circumstantially appears to every chance for happiness, especially when compared with others. As many critics have noted, Isabel Archer experiences tragedy because of this great potential for fulfillment rather than in spite of it. However, what critics have tended to overlook is the other parallel, though "minor," irony of the novel: her friend Henrietta Stackpole's fulfillment and move to England. The infamous ending of Isabel can be better understood by looking at it through the lens of intercultural competence and by comparing it with that of Henrietta. Building off the theory of unconscious versus conscious cultural identity that James sketches in his essay 1878 "Americans Abroad," this article analyzes the role self-consciousness and awareness of cultural differences in the development of the novel's characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light upon a nineteenth-century reader-response approach to The Turn of the Screw and "Daisy Miller"grounded on an ethical basis that is shaped by dominant Victorian values, beliefs, and ideas concerning the catalytic role of family towards the proper raising of children, the importance of duty, the traits of the ideal woman and mother, and the good or evil nature of people who are members of different socioeconomic classes, all of which are controlling factors of (un)restrained sexuality and its impact on social order. Within this context, the writer of this article claims that in both stories Henry James is interested in pointing out the threat of a general moral corruption that characterizes the Western world of his time, particularly the socio-economically powerful nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon middle-class, with the latter vacillating between excessive freedom/ naivity and excessive rigidness/ hypocricy. Furthermore, the writer claims the complementary character of the two stories. Although "Daisy Miller" chronologically preceeds The Turn of the Screw, the latter's examination prior to a discussion of "Daisy Miller" may be helpful because The Turn of the Screw is a more complete work in the sense that elaborates more on the moral and psychological condition of characters who strikingly resemble those in the story of "Daisy Miller." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how description generally, and color particularly, “bear upon” Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903), the action of which is understood as the process and education of Lambert Strether’s vision and that of the reader. While the narrative of The Ambassadors is largely Strether’s “intimate adventure” and “even the projection of his consciousness upon it,” he is not at “once hero and historian” (XXI, xvi), a distinction too often erased. Focusing on the use of color in The Ambassadors helps bring this distinction into relief, both on Strether’s sense of past and present, of “should” and “is,” and on the very separate narrator/historian’s perspective. The central intelligence separately shapes the education and process of Strether’s vision, as well as that of the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Henry James's The Golden Bowl, although Maggie Verver is in love with her husband, her silence, regarding his affair, is quite enigmatic. However, in the theory of masquerade, which Joan Riviere proposed in a 1929 seminal essay, this idea was deconstructed. According to the theory of masquerade, women submit to the social codes by wearing a mask of womanliness while at the same time surreptitiously following their own phallic desires. Therefore, even their typically virtuous act of silence can be understood as a womanly disguise which is inherently a masquerade. This paper aims to analyze Maggie's silence, despite the infidelity and betrayal shown to her by her friend and husband, in order to demonstrate how, according to Riviere, her silence and quietness are not signs of victimhood in the patriarchal society but only tactics which she consciously uses to empower herself and achieve what she wants by the end of the novel. In light of the theories of Joan Riviere, this paper intends to illustrate how (in the context of James's narrative strategies) Maggie comes to empower herself without radically intimidating the value structure of the Jamesian patriarchal society and by the use of silence as a mask of womanliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have carefully discerned how nineteenth-century modes of mourning differ from Sigmund Freud's later model, the distinction between mourning and grief, in texts of the period and beyond, tends to be collapsed. This essay argues that Henry James disentangles the two terms by insisting on mourning's association with ritualistic, social behavior, most iconically the wearing of a black dress. In James's writing, to be ''in mourning'' generally means to be physically within such a dress, without reference to one's emotional state. His use of the phrase, particularly in ''The Altar of the Dead'' (1895) and ''Maud-Evelyn'' (1900), thus offers ways of thinking through responses to death apart from grief. One is that the black dress can obscure, rather than advertise, the wearer's feelings. Another is that such garments may facilitate ongoing relationships with persons now dead. Such processes of mourning without grief are nearly impossible to recognize after the advent of psychoanalysis, yet this essay concludes by finding evidence of their circulation in today's political resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, in a Paris library, I found a long and interesting letter from Edith Wharton to Minnie Bourget. Among other things, Wharton discusses her reading-- including Henry James's latest (but unnamed) novel and her own writing. In this article I explain why I think the letter was written in 1896 and what new questions the date opens up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the first three literary reactions to Fenian terrorism: Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson’s co-written novel,The Dynamiter(1885); Tom Greer’sA Modern Daedalus(1885) and Henry James’The Princess Casamassima(1886). Although these works approach terrorism from different angles, they set the pattern for subsequent treatments that will “give primary voice to the perspective of the terrorist”. “Zero”, the hapless bomb-makers inThe Dynamiter, is a surprisingly urbane, sympathetic figure; Greer illustrates both the necessity and the moral quandaries of terrorism and James shows considerable sympathy for anarchism’s causes, even though terrorism threatens high art and culture. I also hope to show that fiction can provide excellent source material for studying the cultural imaginary of terrorism and, by extension, make a bid for the inclusion of literature scholars under the umbrella of Critical Terrorism Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses upon the history of both academic and fictional biographies of Henry James - a writer well known for his complex vision of the balance of private/public in life-writing. The proliferation of biofictions in the 2000s (D. Lodge, C. Tóibín and others) is viewed as a result of James's conscious self-mythologizing, which is related to fictional elements in academic biographies (L. Edel, F. Kaplan et al.) The complicated and multidirectional process of myth-making and mythdestruction is symptomatic of the current situation with regard to biographies of Henry James, which obviously sets the current situation apart from earlier stages of development (1990s-2000s), when fictionalizing determined the main vector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AlthoughWashington Squareappears to be a thoroughly assured and compactly structured novel bearing testimony to Henry James’s predilection for dramatic representation, the text provides a site for fertile experimentation with the protean possibilities of fictional form.Washington Squareis a realist novel that is not quite realist. While James pays close attention to such pertinent factors as time, place, characterisation and dialogue, a fleeting autobiographical interpolation begins to destabilise predictable generic assumptions. As the narrative unfolds, the reader is drawn into engaging with aspects of the plot that suggest both a moving drama of intense psychological struggle and a modern domestic tragedy. At the same time, the text calls into question frequently accepted referential links to the experiential world by subtly foregrounding its affiliations to the processes of aesthetic production. From this perspective, the protean potential ofWashington Squaremay be regarded as more closely related to Jane Austen’sNorthanger Abbey, Honoré de Balzac’sEugénie Grandetor Victor Cherbuliez’s now obscureLe Comte Kostia(1863) than to conventionally acknowledged mimetic principles. Such an interpretation is reinforced by James’s consistent foregrounding of the flexible linguistic play of his narrative. Irony is the dominant modality of both the narrator and Dr Sloper, while melodrama in quite distinct guises becomes the expressive medium of the Doctor, as well as his foolishly interfering sister, Mrs Penniman. Morris Townsend, as disingenuous suitor, is an accomplished manipulator of language. This leaves Catherine, the disappointing daughter, vulnerable heiress and rejected bride, to complete the dynamic equilibrium of a rhetorical square (reflecting the title of the novel) with the pathos of her silent endurance. Yet Catherine’s quiet inwardness serves equally as the ethical focus of James’s story. Her frustrated anticipation of, and yearning for, a life of modest recognition and emotional reciprocity is poised against the glittering repartee of James’s scenes and the imaginative cleverness required by the aesthetic enterprise. It is ultimately Catherine’s consciousness that consumes the verbal gymnastics of the novel into the privacy of her chastened, yet resilient, existence. As James understands, the rest must be silence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, the theme of "neglected child" in Henry James' "The Pupil" (1891) is explored. Morgan is a neglected child with unscrupulous parents who hold strictly on the Victorian values which reflect American cultural consciousness in the last decades of 19th century. Although he is a brilliant boy, the family does not love him; because he reminds them of their vulgarity. They neglect him physically and emotionally, seeing him as a burden. Although his tutor tries to keep the boy from the family's corruption, he contributes to his death; he neglects his illness and deserts him when he is most needy. As an interpreter, James draws attention to the situation of children that are not working but being tutored at home. He criticizes this culture's general attitude towards children. It is a disturbing social reality and he shows how that materialistic culture victimizes children in terms of neglectful parenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the influence of late nineteenth-century transatlantic celebrity journalism on the conception of Henry James’ novelThe Reverberator(1888). A relatively neglected work in James’ canon,The Reverberatoris known for its satirical treatment of the ‘mania for publicity’, but the depth of its engagement in contemporary debates on the ‘New Journalism’ in Britain and equivalent journalistic practices in America has not been fully recognized. Inspired by two documented cases of transatlantic controversy generated by Joseph Pulitzer’sNew York World,The Reverberatorexplores the mass mediation of cultural conflicts in an age of telecommunication and the incipient globalization of geographical space. The essay focuses in particular on James’ response to the furore surrounding Julian Hawthorne’s purported ‘interview’ with James Russell Lowell, published in October 1886: an example of the type of celebrity culture often associated with the New Journalism and inscribed in such textual forms as the interview, gossip column and cable news report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying Gilbert Osmond as the embodiment of evil is a commonplace observation in the voluminous commentary on Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. However, critics of the novel have been remiss in providing a comprehensive examination of Osmond's nefarious actions and the depraved personality behind them. This essay deciphers evidence previously overlooked to reveal that Osmond is even more unscrupulous and evil than has been conventionally observed. In addition, the essay demonstrates why James's depiction of Osmond endures as a compelling and insightful psychological portrait. Enabling one to fathom this enigmatic character, Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic profile of "narcissistic rage" illuminates Osmond's pathological condition and provides a motive for his malignancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Small Boy and Others (1913) is rarely discussed for failing to explain the artist Henry James became--indeed, for failing to cohere as narrative at all. This essay attempts to do that. The reason for both of these failures is due in part to James's two-dimensional depiction of himself as a youth, "wondering and dawdling and gaping," and in part to the nature of the narrator who mirrors that earlier self, also lost in wonder. This symbiosis of "small boy" and aged artist subverts an autobiographical logic by lauding both earlier and present selves as passive receptacles. The question is why James deliberately mystifies readers this way, given the care with which he reconstructed his past. The answer is that his personal reasons for revisiting his past coincided with a set of different assumptions about consciousness and psychology than had informed his late novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American, The Europeans, Daisy Miller, and The Portrait of a Lady are four representative novels of international theme by Henry James. To ensure the successful proceeding of the international theme, James employs a common crucial motif—environment in the four novels. The motif is, in essence, one of the important narrating arts James invents. James' use of it is not only out of the structural consideration to carry out the narration effectively, for instance, to strengthen the theme, to foster the character portrayal, to increase the dramatic conflicts so as to drive the narrative to the climax, but also based on a philosophical concern with aesthetics and humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism is presented for the book "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, which focuses on the use of the arts in the novel. Topics discussed include the use of allusion in the novel, the use of ghosts in the book, and the needlework skills of the governess that is a character in the novel.

This article uses the life of Alice James to reread her brother Henry's novel, The Bostonians. Alice, who was a partner in a Boston marriage, and her illnesses, of which she wrote in her letters and diary, provides a means of reassessing the gender dynamics of James's only novel about suffrage and the women's movement. Her life sheds light on and offers an alternative reading of the novel's problematic heteronormative movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]