Henry james brief biography of mark

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Henry james' writing style

This biography explores the life of Henry James, an American author whose career spanned significant cultural changes in both America and Europe. It discusses his early influences, notable works, and the complex identity he grappled with as an American expatriate. The narrative highlights his extensive social network, publishing challenges, and literary contributions, framing him as a pivotal figure in the development of American literature.

This dissertation examines the modern, worldly dimensions of Henry James's literary practice evident across his criticism, nonfiction, and novelistic fiction, which James described to be his "various," comparative response to U. Drawing upon contemporary critical turns to ethical and affective-oriented aesthetic modes of interpretation, I show that James's "various" literary practice expresses worldly and comparative thinking that opposes the private, Protestant-informed "business enterprise" society developing in the United States around the turn of the twentieth-century.

Henry james - wikipedia

In describing James to be an oppositional critic to American business enterprise, my dissertation contributes to ongoing interventions in Henry James studies that have reconstructed James to be a more historically-minded and politically-engaged thinker than asserted in canonical, twentieth-century formalist and New Critical approaches to James's literary work.

My dissertation's formal construction forefronts James's contributions as a literary critic, and I describe an oppositional, critical reading practice in his thought based upon ethical, aesthetic, and political modes of reading. James's practice as a critic, I argue, not only enables critics today to confront and challenge the ongoing contentious politics of interpretation in Henry James studies, but it allows readers to discern the critical and oppositional dimensions of his novelistic literary fiction, which I show to be particularly evident in The Portrait of a Lady.

In my readings of James's critical, autobiographical, and fictional works in light of these selected works of criticism and theory, I aim to demonstrate that Henry James critics may comprehend a discernible Jamesian "text" that in toto expresses a new, modern way of thinking in American novelistic literary art that occasions difference from a business-dominated, theocratically-inclined, Protestant American culture.

Despite the particular, historically-distinct discrepancies between these somewhat disparate theoretical orientations, I aim to demonstrate their value for revealing Henry James's commitment to the democratic conditions of a still-emergent form of modernity that he practices in novelistic literary art. As a result of formalist-oriented New Criticism and polemical Left criticism, James has typically been taken to be anything but a.

American studies. A Modernist cosmopolitan author "who forces us to recognize the inherent problems of national authorship," James "would be horrified by the misinterpretation of his works as testaments" of national values and by his commodification as an American writer.