Henry James Goes to ParisHenry James's reputation as The Master is so familiar that it's hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year--1875 to 1876--when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James's writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist's Paris year--and its momentous artistic and personal consequences. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 35
... France. 2. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Appreciation—France. I. Title. PS2127.F7B76 2007 813'.4—dc22 [B] British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Electra Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press ...
... France and in French culture. He claimed that his earliest childhood memory—from his second year—was of the Place Vendôme, with its Napoleonic column; and another family trip when he was thirteen had lasted well over a year, with ...
... France had only just emerged from the maximum trauma of a century in which it endured several. The seemingly solid, wealthy, well-administered Second Empire, which had created the legend—and to a great extent the reality—of Paris as the ...
... France has ever known, forever remembered as la semaine sanglante, the bloody week. When peace finally was arranged, much of central Paris, including the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville, lay in smoking ruins, torched by the ...
... France James encountered in 1875 was far from secure politically; indeed it was full of tensions, intrigue, and the threat of another upheaval. Thiers had fallen in the spring of 1873, and was replaced by Marshal MacMahon, chief of the ...
Contents
1 | |
7 | |
2 The Dream of an Intenser Experience | 53 |
3 What a Droll Thing to Represent | 79 |
4 Flauberts Nerds | 101 |
5 The Quickened Notation of Our Modernity | 129 |
6 The Death of Zola Sex in the French Novel and the Improper | 156 |
7 For the Sake of This End | 177 |
Chariot of Fire | 205 |
Notes | 211 |
Bibliography | 233 |
Acknowledgments | 241 |
Index | 243 |