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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... 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 grandfather William James in Albany, in merchandising, banking ...
... senses and his tastes, he certainly lives as well here as he can imagine doing.” Paris was a place of luxury, pleasure, beautiful surfaces, sensuous enjoyment. Brother William in his letters will call it “the modern Babylon.” There is a ...
... sense. The Republic is now for the first time in Republican hands, and it remains to be seen what they will make of it.” There was in fact here the makings of a confrontation and crisis, which would come on May 16, 1877—after James had ...
... senses in some of these letters to Cambridge that James wants to “do” French society in a suitably novelistic style. He continues in this letter to William to describe Madame de Blocqueville as “a great invalid, very corpulent, never ...
... sense of high admiration for the novelist and the man. His tone is one of adoration. There is what you would call in psychoanalytic terms a transference onto the older man, who takes a place of paternal authority to James, a source 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 |