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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... become a novelist in Paris. Jump, for a moment, nearly to the end of the story of James's engagement with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. It's Virginia Woolf, in her biography of the Bloomsbury artist, critic, and ...
... become—it may be well to try to recreate the experience of the young man in a kind of stereoscopic view, including the Master as a kind of hovering figure. In any case, what I have tried to do is first and foremost tell the story—the ...
... become a monarchy in 1873 or 1874 had it not been for the intransigence of Chambord, who was a prime example of the adage that the Bourbons learned nothing and forgot nothing. He insisted on taking the country back to the white flag of ...
... become president, and the southern states authorized to liquidate the post–Civil War Reconstruction practiced by the Radical Republicans. But the French situation was potentially more explosive, and James met it with equanimity. He ...
... becomes a major Jamesian touchstone for the kind of novelist he wants to be. Parallels have been drawn between the Russian and the American, novelists of two countries of large vistas and yet-unfolded possibilities. “American readers of ...
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 |