Disappearing Authors and Resentful Readers in Late Nineteenth-Century American Fiction: The Case of Henry James

ELH ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Hochman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Professors, Charlatans, and Spiritists: The Stage Hypnotist in Late Nineteenth-Century English Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 007
Author(s):  
Juan Marcos Bonet Safont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Henry James ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Essential Contribution

In this paper I will explore the stereotype of the stage hypnotist in fiction literature through the analysis of the novellas Professor Fargo (1874) by Henry James (1843-1916) and Drink: A Love Story on a Great Question (1890) by Hall Caine (1853-1931). Both Professor Fargo and Drink form part of a literary subgenre referred to variously as “Hypnotic Fiction”, “Trance Gothic” or “mesmeric texts”. The objective of my research, which examines both the literary text itself and its historical and social context, is to offer new and interesting data that may contribute to the development of a poetics or theory of the literary subgenre of hypnotic fiction. In this sense, this article is an essential contribution to a broader analysis that I have been working on, focusing on highlighting the generic features of this type of literature by analysing the stereotypes of hypnotists in fiction.

Vernon Lee’s Hideous Roman à Clef

Genre ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Matthew John Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
External Context ◽  
Critical Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Following Henry James, literary-critical practices presume the autonomy and integrity of the literary text. The roman à clef meanwhile troubles this autonomy by presuming a transparent and concrete relation between text and world. By turning to the late nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee, who elevates reference as a vital principle of all literary representation, this essay argues that the roman à clef challenges our assumptions about the value of reference. Lee’s novel Miss Brown (1884), a roman à clef about British aestheticism, is treated as a privileged case study for reading this alternative history of the novel. By focusing on the provisionality of literature, which Lee calls a “half-art,” this essay argues that literature’s reference to an external context provides a point of departure for thinking about women’s disempowerment and vulnerability in late nineteenth-century British culture. At the same time, it argues that provisionality offers a model for considering the broader consequences of limitation and determination in the history of the novel.

Authorship, Inscription, and ‘The Great American Interviewer’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Roach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter begins in the late nineteenth century and argues that the interviewer becomes a powerful foil for realist writers in this era of celebrity. The new figure of the interviewer raised difficult questions around processes of inscription, both mechanical and aesthetic, provoking anxieties around boundaries between public and private, bodies and machines, and about the credibility and authority of information communication via these networks. Drawing on the writings of Henry James and William Dean Howells, amongst others, this chapter demonstrates that the interviewer becomes bound up with debates about the limitations of the realist project and also comes to represent the excesses of optical scrutiny to which the realist author does not succumb. For Henry James in particular, interviewing becomes a crucial site for him to reflect on the embodied nature of communication in general.

Howells's Obscure Hurt

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
John W. Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth

‘ Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble ’, wrote W. D. Howells in 1881. It is a striking coincidence in American literary history that four major writers of the late nineteenth century – Howells, Henry James, S. L. Clemens, and Henry Adams – all failed to serve in the Civil War. Whether or not they believed that they had turned their backs on their country, each made some excuse in his published work. The most notorious is Henry James's statement in Notes of a Son and Brother that ‘ a horrid even if an obscure hurt ’ had prevented him from volunteering to fight.

Invalid Modernism

2019 ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Michael Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Aesthetic

The opening chapter discusses representations of the aesthete and convalescent as seminal figures in the late nineteenth-century formation of modernist art and literature. Unlike the more fashionable treatment of disease in the Victorian period, embodied often in the figure of the female invalid, modernist representations of disease or illness were more likely to be considered pathological, subject to increasing medicalization, diagnosis, and incarceration. The figures of the male aesthete and convalescent offer a more transgressive model to ideals of health and improvement by which modernity is measured. This figure was, not insignificantly, formative in the appearance of the sexual other or “invert” in sexological research. By looking at several writers—Friedrich Nietzsche, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—this opening chapter seeks a correlation between the aesthetic and the body, between autonomy and contagion.

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