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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... letters had just been given the consecration of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. James missed much of what he experienced—but missed it, I think, only for the time being. It would be back, to shape his own writing in crucial ways. As I ...
... on French poets and novelists—and before setting out for Paris he proposed to the New York Tribune to write fortnightly letters from Paris. Through the good offices of John Hay (the future Secretary of State), he 8 Chapter 1.
... letter—less than he had hoped for, but enough to give him the sense that he had a job as a journalist. He had always resisted any career or profession other than literature. His family was well-off, from the fortune accumulated by his ...
... letters to the Tribune; the first appeared under the date November 22. Three days later, Roderick Hudson was published in book form by J. R. Osgood in Boston. James promptly proposed to the editor of the Galaxy a new novel for ...
... letter indeed marvels at “the amazing elasticity of France. Beaten and humiliated on a scale without precedent, despoiled, dishonoured, bled to death financially—all this but yesterday—Paris is today in outward aspect as radiant, as ...
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 |