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
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... James's engagement with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. It's Virginia Woolf, in her biography of the Bloomsbury artist, critic, and aesthetic theorist Roger Fry, who recounts James's visit in 1912—he was now close to ...
Peter Brooks. most of all triggered James's longstanding hesitations about Flaubert, offering a cautionary tale in the infringement of certain commitments to representation. James in 1912 was a modernist master, but one who clung to a ...
... James's late style, a finish that is perhaps more comparable to an Old Master than to a contemporary such as Cézanne. The more wrenching questions of perspective, of how one sees and how one knows, come just before the major phase, in a ...
... James's biographer, Leon Edel, notes that after 1895 James seems already to have left the nineteenth century behind, and to be moving toward the fictional experimentation of Joyce, of Woolf, of Proust. James the modernist is by now so ...
... James managed, through the good offices of Paul Zhukovsky, to dine out with Turgenev and the Princess Ourousov at a restaurant near the Opéra-Comique, the Russian novelist had to leave early, to meet the curfew. James would come to ...
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 |