scholarly journals The Imprisoned, Unspeakable Self: Silenced Sexuality in Henry James

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Camarasana
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
The Relationship

This essay analyzes Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) as a novel, like several other works by James, that hints at but never fully articulates homosexual desire. The relationship between Boston feminist Olive Chancellor and her protégé, Verena Tarrant, is a study in self-silencing and repression. In particular, James subtly explores Olive Chancellor’s struggle with an internal prison, her suppressed homosexuality, which was likely James’s own sexual struggle as well. In addition, James’s literary style, his famously imposing and dense walls of verbiage attempt to articulate secrets without ever stating what’s hidden. Paradoxically, James’s voluminous wall of words calls the reader’s attention to what is silent in his characters and in James himself.

James Examines Shakespeare: Notes on the Nature of Genius

PMLA ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-128
Author(s):  
William T. Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Critical Comment ◽  
Critical Problem ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Dramatic Criticism ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Relationship

When Oscar Cargill suggested thatweshould re-examine Henry James's The Princess Casamassima in terms of the parallels its protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, has with both Anglo-American and continental attitudes toward Hamlet, he partly opened the door on another critical problem—the relation of James to all of Shakespeare. I propose to open that door a good deal wider without presuming to have opened it all the way or to have explored every aspect of the relationship. The novelist, it turns out, has much to say explicitly about the poet. His autobiographical memoirs, his published letters, his critical prefaces, his notebooks, and his literary and dramatic criticism, when taken collectively, reveal a surprisingly large body of both casual and critical comment on Shakespeare. More importantly, James wrote a longish but apparently little-known introduction to one of the poet's plays, which in effect is an interpretation and evaluation of the whole Shakespeare. And, of course, he wrote “The Birthplace,” that amusing but provocative tale of the caretakers of Shakespeare's home in Stratford. If a survey of this material does not throw much new light on the poet, it does, I think, importantly illuminate a significant aspect of Henry James—his critical attitude toward literary genius; in addition, it sharpens our understanding of “The Birthplace.”

scholarly journals Grøn topologi. Ei nylesing av Vergils hjul

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (123) ◽  
pp. 269-290
Author(s):  
Aslaug Nyrnes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Age ◽  
World View ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Topological Theory ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Pastoral Tradition ◽  
The Relationship

Nature is a complex phenomenon; it is both a physical object and a variety of cultural imaginations and representations. The current climate crises challenge the relationship between nature and language in radically new ways. This article examines an example of what we can call the green topology, figures that are part of, and shape the climate course. Virgil's wheel is a topos from the Middle Age, traced back to the pastoral tradition of Virgil, presenting specific connections between literary style and topography. The question in this article is what perspective on nature is implicit in this thought figure. Do Virgil's wheel as a topos challenge the dominant view on nature from the Romantic period? Can we understand Vergil's wheel in opposition to an anthropocentric world-view? If so, does Vergil's wheel have ecocritic potential? The article draws on perspectives from ecocritical theory, rhetorical topological theory and Schiller's philosophy on nature and the sentimental.

American Realism and Photography

2019 ◽  
pp. 552-565
Author(s):  
Astrid Böger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Paul Laurence Dunbar ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Jacob Riis ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between realist literature and photography since their emergence in the mid-nineteenth century. Both media responded to the challenges of modernity by contriving new means of representing reality. Whereas photography became the standard for objective reproduction following the pictorial turn, realist authors including Henry James and Paul Laurence Dunbar honed literature’s capacity to focus on inner realities, such as subjective experience and memory, impossible to capture in a photograph. Jacob Riis, in turn, adopted the aesthetic of the urban picturesque for How the Other Half Lives, a photo-textual record of immigrant life in New York serving as a precursor for the documentary books of the Great Depression, which advocated national relief programs to alleviate the distress of rural Americans. Countering such facile approaches to complex realities, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally, presents a fundamental critique of representation itself.

The Novel in the Era of Plessy

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-86
Author(s):  
Christine Holbo
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
The Relationship

The transformation of literary realism in the late nineteenth century took place within the context of a categorical shift in American social epistemologies. The first chapter presents an interdisciplinary, generational portrait of this shift by examining a set of key texts from the years 1896–98 as summaries of the reconstruction of law, literature, and philosophy since the Civil War. Two important works by the James brothers, philosopher William James’s “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, demonstrate how the relationship between “sentiment” and “rationality” had been transformed. By attacking the nineteenth century’s trust in the emotions alongside its belief in a transcendent concept of reason, William and Henry James made a case for a new kind of moral imagination grounded in the uncertainty of the emotions and the unknowability of other selves. While the James brothers greeted the collapse of the sentimental paradigm as an emancipatory moment for individuals and for the novel itself, the lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée saw it as imperiling the ability of Americans to speak, write, or think about freedom. Best known as Homer Plessy’s lawyer in Plessy v. Ferguson, Tourgée was also the most passionate defender of the emancipatory role of the sentimental novel. Exploring Tourgée’s opposition to pluralistic relativism in his brief on behalf of Homer Plessy and his literary analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this chapter explores the opposition between the Jameses’ celebratory vision of epistemological perspectivalism and Tourgée’s defense of sentimental reason.

scholarly journals La rêverie aquatique dans les textes de chansons modernes (1946-2011) des pays méditerranées de l’Union européenne

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Παναγιώτης Μακρής
Keyword(s):  
Fresh Water ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Running Water ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Relationship

Within the concept of this research, the lyrics of 214 songs of modern Mediterranean E.U. countries (selected from 40,000 lyrics found) are analysed in the context of literary style structures, categorised by the water element in its different forms: liquid (sea, ocean, lakes, rivers, running water, tears, rain), solid (ice, snow, hail) or gasious (clouds, fog, mist, steam) in order to find the relationship between lyrics of classical poetry and modern songs and that between songwriters of the mediterranean E.U. countries. The results indicate that the texts of modern songs are close contact with classical poetry and folk songs, and that songwriters of the Mediterranean EU are more sensitive to the "charms of the sea", in contrast to classical poetry, where according to studies by Gaston Bachelard, there is a dominance of fresh water to the reverie of the poets.

Translating style and styles of translating: Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe in Catalan

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Marco
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Relationship

This article aims to examine the relationship between style and translation from two complementary perspectives: how the style of original texts fares in translation and how the style of individual translators or groups of translators sharing a common poetics becomes visible in their translated work. The first aspect is illustrated through an analysis of transitivity patterns in a passage from Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, and of deviations from those patterns in two Catalan translations of the story. As to the second, the focus is on the notion of structural calque as displayed by the work of two prominent Catalan translators, Josep Carner and Carles Riba. Riba’s tendency to calque in his translation of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is broken down into two aspects of structure: word order and transitivity.

scholarly journals From everyday speech to literary style: The decline of the distant address De in Norwegian during the twentieth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnete Nesse
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Actual Usage ◽  
Address Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractChange in norms for the use of address forms and change in the actual usage of these forms are an important part of the history of any language. By investigating how certain grammatical features are chosen for specific pragmatic meaning, we deepen our understanding of the relationship between language and society. These changes can be described from several angles by focussing on intralinguistic factors (which linguistic features are used) or on social factors. In this article, we will take both perspectives into consideration by looking at the forms of pronominal address that have been used in Norway, as well as how and why they have changed. The data is drawn primarily from radio and weekly magazines, the popular media of the twentieth century.

London and the Nation in the Nineteenth Century (The Prothero Lecture)

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between London and the rest of the nation is an important but perhaps somewhat neglected aspect of English history. In recent years this theme has, it is true, directly or indirectly, engaged the attention of a number of distinguished scholars, but it is still not generally recognised to be as vital an ingredient in the history of this country as is the rôle of Paris in the history of France. Henry James even went so far as to say that ‘all England is in a suburban relation’ to London, and the standpoint of this paper is equally metropolitan. Its theme is that the loss of its normal preeminence which London seemed to sustain in the nineteenth century was in reality short-lived, and more apparent than real.

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