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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... novel—a project that leads him over and over again to set against Flaubert's practice the more nourishing example of Balzac. So a modernist master who is unwilling to make the leap beyond that we see in the work Cézanne did in Provence ...
... novel, Roderick Hudson, began its serial publication in the Atlantic Monthly. Back in Cambridge in midJuly, he ... novels was taken seriously. The decision was radical. Here was a young writer (age thirty-two), author of two novels (the ...
... novel. Already on December 1 he was able to write to F. P. Church, editor of the Galaxy: “I propose to take it for granted, as soon as I can, that you will be ready to publish, on receipt of them, the opening chapters of a novel. I have ...
... novel. Yet his reading of his dinner companion seems to have ended there. Years later, he queried William on his brother's subsequent career as a novelist, asking if he had fulfilled his ambitions. William in return sent him The Golden ...
... novel, Virgin Soil, published early in 1877. James's critics have paid curiously little attention to the close affinities between Virgin Soil and the novel James would undertake eight years later, The Princess Casamassima. Turgenev ...
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 |