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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... never stays put, both because they are moving and because the observed itself alters under the observing eye. It's a kind of radical perspectivalism that James brought to the novel perhaps more consistently than any other novelist ...
... never could really appreciate. 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 ...
... never fully accept it. If he later speaks in high praise of Monet, late Flaubert always makes him uncomfortable. Rightly so, one might say, because he no doubt correctly detects that there is in a book like Bouvard et Pécuchet a more ...
... never seemed a solution to Henry James's aspirations—no doubt in large part because of the remarkable family, especially because of the brilliant older brother. He wandered much in Europe as a young man, and made prolonged stays ...
... never came without strings attached, especially since the bookkeeping fell to his mother, who indeed was Henry's banker for many years, collecting royalties for him and surveilling his expenditures from the letter of credit provided by ...
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 |