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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]

The present text aims to problematise the work of I.L. Caragiale through the lens of reception theories, hermeneutics, and textuality while at the same time questioning some of the structuring themes of his writing, such as truth, the quest and the reader. Using texts such as ‘O conferență’, ‘Două loturi’, ‘Inspecțiune’, ‘Năpasta’, ‘D’ale carnavalului’, ‘Abu Hassan’, ‘1 Aprilie’ and others, the author aims to highlight elements of substance, attitude and style that converge in Caragiale’s writing, which, beyond the social, it associates the metaphysical comic or the idea of empty transcendence with the concern for truth, meta-textuality or the social. In this context, the proximity of I.L. Caragiale to Alphonse Allais or Henry James, in the interpretations of Umberto Eco and Wolfgang Iser, is supported beyond the similarities that legitimise the reading of I.L. Caragiale from the perspective of reception theories, by the fact that their relevant texts were written at the height of the Belle Époque. Therefore, Caragiale’s world appears as a luminous, complicit, seductive irony.

Amateur film discourse is a new special subtype of discourse that has not yet been subjected to scientific research. Its participants have no special cinema education: they discuss the film industry based on their own life experience, ideas, and values. This work was part of the contemporary anthropocentric paradigm, where language comes to the fore as the most important property of human beings. The article identifies the genre of amateur film discourse using online Russian comments to the screen adaptation of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), directed by S. McGehee and D. Siegel (2012). The methods of comparison and discourse analysis revealed sincerity in the way the commentors evaluated their impressions. The commentors seemed focused on the plot and the action. The discourse was highly emotional and colloquial, filled with aposiopesis and rhetorical questions.

Prototype theory, which argues that categories have graded (and thus fuzzy) membership based on prototypes, has been used as cognitive evidence to support moral particularism because if categories (in moral rules) only have fuzzy conceptual boundaries, moral rules are not enough for moral judgment, as specific situations also need to be considered to determine how these fuzzy categories should be understood, which is what moral particularism believes. The importance of literature for ethics, especially for moral imagination, has also been extensively discussed because literature can provide vivid examples for us to imagine different moral dilemmas, the consequences of different moral choices, and the feelings of different people facing different situations. Martha Nussbaum specifically argues that the literary form is the only adequate form to imagine certain complex moral situations. By analyzing concrete literary examples as well as the related ethical discussions and empirical findings, this article argues that, building on Nussbaum's argument, prototype theory can serve as a cognitive basis for the importance of literary form for moral imagination, because the literary form's tolerance of ambiguity suits how we ambiguously categorize the world. [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]

Letters in literature intimately convey information to both the characters and the reader; letters in literature also represent captured moments that the characters can revisit over and over again to relive memories of themselves and the letter’s author from the vantage of temporal distance. When characters keep letters into their old age, the letter becomes a catalyst for reflection on who they have become in their society. In Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers, the titular papers are in possession by a famous author’s former lover, now an old woman, and a young man is trying to purchase them for their literary value. The old woman uses the letters as leverage to claim power for herself and her niece. Edith Wharton’s novella The Touchstone similarly focuses on the letters of a famous dead author, but in this case, it is a man having to confront the passionate affair of his youth, when wanting to settle into the prescribed social views on marriage and career. Both of these works use the letter as a way to explore the tensions that come with having a record of cavalier youthful behaviors with the desire to maintain a position in society – the tension between dissention and conforming. These two novellas take two different positions on this tension with James favoring the former and Wharton the latter. Both illustrate the complicated cultural forces that shape perceptions of ageing

If we love the work of a writer whose politics, personal behaviour and character can be shown to be alarming, disgusting or dangerous - if she, he (or they) is racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, a child-molester or an advocate of selective murder - should we continue to admire their prose? This is the central question that has preoccupied my thinking about neo-Victorian biographical fictions. In this essay, I examine the tensions between three modes of writing: history, biography, and fiction and address the question of neo-Victorian critical ethics. I then proceed to discuss two biographical fictions of Victorian writers, written at the beginning of the twenty-first century in very different literary registers. The first text is Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004), which dramatises the later writing years of Henry James. The second text is Kate Roiphe's Still She Haunts Me (2001), which reinterprets the relationship between Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don who became Lewis Carroll, and his child Muse, Alice Liddell. Neither of these novels were consciously written as neo-Victorian biographical fictions, yet both address the question of biographical ethics and judgements. Do we write to defend the writers we love against all comers, or to judge them in the light of contemporary morals and literary aesthetics? Or are we simply rewriting them in our own image? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Lambert Strether exhorts John "Little" Bilham to "live!" (154) in Henry James' The Ambassadors (1903), we trust that we know what he means. What, after all, could be more self-evident than the idea that life should be experienced as fully and enjoyably as possible, and that it is a mistake not to do so? Going against the grain of critical consensus, in this essay I argue that Strether's injunction becomes ringed with uncertainty the moment that it is subjected to analytic scrutiny. This uncertainty does not generate scepticism about the possibility of leading a life, but is rather an invitation to pose questions about the everyday language we employ to describe, evaluate, and make sense of the activity of 'living.' I claim that James uses the breakdown of Strether's speech to draw attention to the fact that much of this language is wedded to a hyperbolic picture of agency that is either rigidly voluntaristic or deterministic. I show how James' representation of Strether's consciousness of himself as an agent puts pressure on this picture by making it difficult to determine whether he is acting or being acted upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dualistic energies ripple throughout Ozick's writing. Her attraction to good and evil, light and dark, the agonistic and the operatic, the Zarathustrian and the Wagnerian, is undeniable. This article focuses on the literary dimensions of her nonfiction to shed light on her essays' mysterious powers. By eschewing the habitual liturgical framing of Ozick's works for a literary one, this article anatomizes her methods to reveal the precursor form that subtends her essayistic style—melodrama. Ozick's melodrama intervenes in her nonfiction writing like a ghostly haunting from her fiction. It patterns her thought, like a figure in the carpet. This article argues that melodrama is a central characteristic of her work. By positioning Ozick in relation to a longer history of melodrama and the novel in which Henry James is a key figure, the article argues that her employment of melodramatic methods in her nonfiction can be understood as a plea for (i) the legitimization of imagination and (ii) the urgency of the literary arts and their methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the preoccupation with failure that pervades Cynthia Ozick's essays. Ozick regularly presents herself in her public statements as obscure, unread, and soon to be forgotten; in essays and interviews she habitually returns to a period in her twenties and thirties when she labored in vain to get published. Ozick's concern with the youthful literary success that eluded her is the visible edge of a larger fascination with failure that spirals through her essays. Whether comically underscoring the incompetence with which writers approach the ordinary tasks of life or meditating more somberly on the waning of fame and the difficulties of achieving cultural permanence, Ozick finds marginality, failure, and falling short as fundamental to literary creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nonfiction of Cynthia Ozick includes many surrogate father figures, including Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Elie Wiesel. These towering presences have been refashioned by Ozick in what she calls her "literary essays," which she regards as a model of unrestrained creativity as championed by James. Ozick characterizes the literary essay as a gendered "secret self," with a unique persuasive power, which she depicts as an extension of her novel writing. Many of Ozick's essays return these male authority figures to a time when they were unknown, humiliated, and impoverished so that she can encounter them as equals, given her own rejection as a Jewish woman writer in the 1950s and '60s. But Ozick's nonfiction also includes didactic essays that engage with particular topics or events and do completely different kinds of work when compared to their literary counterparts. The tension between these two modes of nonfiction is explored with reference to these father figures, and especially to the Holocaust, which exposes, for Ozick, the limits of the literary essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A tidy story is told about Cynthia Ozick: an aesthete in her youth, her reading of Leo Baeck prompted a break with this "religion of Art" and inspired a polemical commitment to literature centered by a particularly Jewish moral seriousness. This article contests this consensus by revisiting Ozick's career-long articulation of aestheticism's appeal, and particularly her relation to the avatar of modernism in her work, Henry James. By attending to the persistence of aestheticism in a series of Ozick's essays from "Toward a New Yiddish" (1972) to "Tradition and (or Against) the Jewish Writer" (2006), this article shows how the consistency of her attachment to modernism troubles the mainstream view of Ozick as a polemicist for an anti-aesthetic Jewish ethics. In so doing, this article seeks to both rethink the question of Ozick's Jewishness and to contribute to what Benjamin Schreier characterizes as the non-identitarian project of critical Jewish literary study. [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]

This short article interprets Henry James’s Italian Hours (1909) as a series of insights into a phenomenology of seeing, treating the latter as both opening towards the surrounding reality and an act of self-consciousness. James’s phenomenological awareness is informed by his sense of joy, which turns out to be something more than mere delight with beautiful sights and scenes – it is in fact a joy of discovering the world’s freshness and novelty.

This article begins with critics' hostility toward Gilbert Osmond, the notorious villain of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881). It identifies this tradition as a response to Osmond's identity as a trans woman and to the mode of embodiment that Osmond demonstrates as one possible solution to the problem of the "wrong body." The article's first half sketches the status of the wrong body in trans studies, where the concept is disfavored as reproducing a repressive ideology, in contrast to its characterization in Lacanian psychoanalysis as psychotic. The article demonstrates, nonetheless, in the principles of Lacanian theory the postulation of a class of subjects whose psychic sexuation as men or women does not match up with the symbolic sexual identity of their physical persons: subjects who cannot, therefore, assume their physical persons as their bodies (the article terms such embodiment "co‐located"). It then develops a Lacanian analysis of the solution modeled by Osmond to the wrong body problem: "translocated embodiment," in which a subject assumes as their body a sexed form other than their physical person. The second half of the article explores the operation of translocated embodiment in the Anglo‐American leisure‐class community of The Portrait of a Lady. The aestheticism of Gilbert Osmond, Ralph Touchett, and Edward Rosier is read as a historically specific instance of translocated embodiment. Social disfavor of their overt translocation drives James's three connoisseurs, as transgender subjects, to attempt covert translocation via heterosexual courtship and matrimony, aiming to secure advantageous representation in the form of cisgender women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s, it asserts that Isabel's pursuit of freedom is grounded in her 1850s childhood when the Underground Railroad was particularly active in Albany. It examines the Albany home within the historical context of the 1870s and 1880s, when, respectively, Isabel returns to Albany and The Portrait of a Lady was first published. Taking into account the Supreme Court's 1883 Civil Rights Cases, which facilitated housing discrimination against Black Americans, this article argues that the Albany home, whose door remains bolted to the "vulgar street," protects James's American lady from a vulgarity associated then with African Americans. By examining a critically overlooked function of the Albany house—its spatial representation of the novel's plot—this article shows how narratives of Black people escaping slavery along with late nineteenth‐century definitions of vulgarity centrally define Isabel's pursuit of freedom. Analyzing the plot's architecture, the article reveals how James strategically alludes to two novels about racism—overtly to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and covertly to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—to construct his highly influential narrative about a white woman's transatlantic journey toward freedom. [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]

This brief article considers Leo Bersani's descriptions of Maggie Verver, a character in Henry James's novel The Golden Bowl, in relation to some of Bersani's famous arguments about sexuality. Observing that Bersani's presentation of Maggie in "The Jamesian Lie" and elsewhere makes her an apt figure not just for sexuality but also for Bersani's later notion of queer sex as a negation of the social, the article considers both how an ampler consideration of this character might reflect back on Bersani's use of her to instantiate his claims about desire, and how his account of Maggie might speak to readers torn between competing accounts of queer negativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her new book on the function of cynicism, Helen Small defines a positive role that cynicism can play in the liberal articulation of the very ideals and norms that cynicism affronts. She provides this "strategic cynicism" with a nineteenth‐century lineage including Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. This review essay identifies some problems in the concept of strategic cynicism, drawing on Hegel's understanding of intentional action. Strategic cynicism is ultimately a role‐playing (or impersonation) of cynicism by normativity on its own behalf. As Small conceives norms, they are vulnerable to cynicism because they are stranded and without immanent grounding. Turning to Henry James's novel The Awkward Age, this essay shows how cynicism can be answered not by pointing to better intentions, but only by what we discover retrospectively, from the consequences of how things turn out, our commitments to be. The essay ends with a consideration of the dysfunction of liberal responses to Donald Trump's cynicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines is the property of Editions Belin 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.)

Most critics who have analyzed Seamus Deane's novel Reading in the Dark have examined it in the context of his influential scholarly publications. But this approach does not account adequately for the book's form, which reflects Deane's own uncertainty regarding his autobiographical subject. I argue that critics to date have overemphasized James Joyce's influence on Deane's text and underestimated that of Henry James, especially his famously ambiguous novella The Turn of the Screw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]