Daughters and Their Surrogate Mothers in the Early Novels of Henry James PDF Download

Author: Lorna Schaefer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Author: Bright Summaries
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
ISBN: 2808014627
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Unlock the more straightforward side of What Maisie Knew with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of What Maisie Knew by Henry James, which follows a young girl called Maisie and the toll that her parents’ divorce and remarriages take on her. Her parents are shown to care very little about her as a person, and simply use her as a weapon to hurt each other. Through Maisie’s limited perceptions and understandings, Henry James paints a portrait of the ways that lies and infidelity can destroy relationships and tarnish the innocence of the children of those involved. What Maisie Knew is one of James’s best-known works, alongside classics including The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady. He was particularly well-known for the acute psychological insight of his writing, which was far ahead of its time. Find out everything you need to know about What Maisie Knew in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Author: Kenneth Walter Cameron
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Journal of New England Writers.

Author: Martin Middeke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110376717
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 686

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Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.

Author: Josep M. Armengol
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433110863
Category : Masculinity in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities demonstrates how contemporary U.S. novelist Richard Ford, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, rewrites gender, and in particular masculinity, from highly subversive and innovative perspectives. Josep M. Armengol analyzes the construction, as well as the de-construction, of masculinity in all of Ford's major fictional texts to date, ranging from A Piece of My Heart to The Sportswriter to The Lay of the Land. Given its simultaneous critique of traditional masculinity and its depiction of alternative models of being a man, Ford's fiction is shown to be particularly interesting from a men's studies perspective, which aims not only to undermine patriarchal masculinity but also to look for new, non-hierarchical, and more egalitarian models of being a man in contemporary U.S. culture and literature. By framing Ford's contemporary representations of masculinity within a more general context of American literature, this book reveals how his texts continue along a trajectory of earlier American fiction while they also re-examine masculinity in new, more complex ways. Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities contributes to the much-needed revision of men and masculinities in U. S. literature, and especially Richard Ford's fiction, where constructions of gender and masculinity remain, paradoxically enough, largely unexplored.

Author: Henry James
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781533276438
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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The Awkward Age is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in Harper's Weekly in 1898-1899 and then as a book later in 1899. Originally conceived as a brief, light story about the complications created in her family's social set by a young girl coming of age, the novel expanded into a general treatment of decadence and corruption in English fin de siecle life. James presents the novel almost entirely in dialogue, an experiment that adds to the immediacy of the scenes but also creates serious ambiguities about characters and their motives.Mr. and Mrs. Edward Brookenham host an effete, rather corrupt social circle. They are the parents of worthless Harold and sweet but knowledgeable Nanda (age eighteen). Mr. Longdon attends one of their social functions and is amazed at how much Nanda resembles her grandmother, his long-ago love who married another man. Vanderbank, a young civil servant with little money, admires both Mrs. Brookenham (nicknamed "Mrs. Brook") and Nanda. Mrs. Brook seems to want an affair with "Van" but he appears more interested in Nanda. Mr. Longdon promises him a dowry if he marries Nanda. Mrs. Brook is instead trying to get her daughter married to Mitchy, a very rich but rather naive member of her social circle. But Nanda urges Mitchy to marry Aggie, the supposedly sheltered step-niece of one of Mrs. Brook's friends (the Duchess). Mitchy follows the advice, then watches helplessly as Aggie kicks over the traces and starts playing around on him. Van constantly hesitates about proposing to Nanda. She finally tells him and Mitchy to be kind to her mother, then prepares to stay at Mr. Longdon's country home as a kind of surrogate daughter.James originally wanted this novel to resemble one of Gyp's superficial but entertaining novels of social decadence. But the material drew him on, and he wound up with a lengthy book about Nanda's eventual rejection of the often sleazy social circle around her mother. A lot of the characters who drop by Mrs. Brook's house are certainly no saints, and hypocrisy and deceit seem to be their favorite pastimes. Mr. Longdon represents an idealized previous age of better morals and manners. He wants to see Nanda safely married and away from what he views as her mother's corrupting influence. Although the book ends with Nanda preparing to stay at his country house, there are no guarantees as to how her future will play out. With the novel cast almost entirely in dialogue, it's sometimes difficult for the reader to detect the characters' genuine motives. But there's little doubt James meant the book as an attack on what he saw as the increasing irresponsibility and immorality of the society around him. James was always careful to sweeten this rather dour message with a lot of witty satire on the foibles of Mrs. Brook's social circle. He was particularly proud of his treatment of the resourceful if not overly honest Mrs. Brook herself. Many critics see the novel as parallel in theme and setting to James's earlier novel What Maisie Knew, with Nanda as a slightly older version of Maisie. Henry James, OM (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) was an American writer. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James. He is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from a character's point of view allowed him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators brought a new depth to narrative fiction."

Author: John Carlos Rowe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000603539
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture addresses the interesting revival of Henry James’s works in Anglo-American film adaptations and contemporary fiction from the 1960s to the present. James’s fiction is generally considered difficult and part of high culture, more appropriate for classroom study than popular appreciation. However, this volume focuses on the adaptation of his novels into films, challenging us to understand James’s popular reputation today on both sides of the Atlantic. The book offers two explanations for his persistent influence: James’s literary ambiguity and his reliance on popular culture. “Part I: His Times” considers James’s reliance on sentimental literature and theatrical melodrama in Daisy Miller, Guy Domville, The Awkward Age, and several of his lesser known short stories. “Part II: Our Times” focuses on how James’s considerations of changing gender roles and sexual identities have influenced Hollywood representations of emancipated women in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, among others. Recent fiction by authors including James Baldwin and Leslie Marmon Silko also treat Jamesian notions of gender and sexuality while considering his part in contemporary debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both a study of James’s works and a broad range of contemporary film and fiction, Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture demonstrates the continuing relevance of Henry James to our multimedia, interdisciplinary, globalized culture.

Author: P. J. Keating
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571286968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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The Haunted Study , a rare example of a work of literary history that is genuinely interdisciplinary, explores how the leading novelists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods came to develop so many of the attitudes that are now generally accepted as characteristically modern. The writing of fiction is not treated as though it exists in some kind of isolation, but is shown to be intimately related to other forms of social activity. Conrad, James, Meredith, and their immediate modernist successors Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf, may now seem to be set apart in a variety of crucial ways from, say, Ouida and Marie Corelli, or even Gissing, Wells, and Bennett, but all of them worked within the same rapidly changing society and were unavoidably influenced by its dominant economic, political, and cultural concerns. These influences were not peripheral, but central and formative. They profoundly affected the creation of a commercially fragmented culture as well as the nature of fiction within that culture. The Haunted Study covers an exceptionally large number of authors, from the critically despised to the critically admired, and examines the impact on their work of such factors as the professionalisation of literature, the earning power of authors, the emergence of new kinds of readers, and, disturbingly present throughout the whole period, fundamental democratic change.

Author: Fred Kaplan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780801862717
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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The one empire he most coveted, the land that he wanted for his primary home, was the empire of art.--from Henry James: The Imagination of Genius

Author: Judith Merril
Publisher: New York : Dell Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Science fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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