The Sacred Fount

The Sacred Fount

Author: Henry James

Publisher: Franklin Classics Trade Press

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9780344272547

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.


The Secret of Lost Things

The Secret of Lost Things

Author: Sheridan Hay

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2010-08-19

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 000738808X

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A stunning debut from a Australian writer – the story of a treasure hunt through a vast New York bookshop.


Studies in Henry James

Studies in Henry James

Author: Richard P. Blackmur

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780811208635

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"A bibliographical note: Blackmur's essays on Henry James": p. 243-244. Includes index.


The Sacred Fount

The Sacred Fount

Author: Henry James

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780811212793

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One of Henry James's most mesmerizing and unusual novels, The Sacred Fount (1901) has for its scene a weekend party at the great English country house Newmarch. Here James leads the reader down a bizarre garden path. The Sacred Fount--his only novel to employ a first-person narrator--places us in the hands of an obsessive novelist (never named and never described, but perhaps familiar), who detects alarming changes in his acquaintances. A woman known for her élan has lost her poise, a dull man is charming; a friend is suddenly aged, a plain woman sparkles. Where one improves, another seems to suffer. With "plunges of insight," "as noiseless and guarded as if I were trapping a bird," the narrator stalks his fellow guests through the weekend, avidly trying to make sense of what he comes to believe are actual exchanges of life force. "The sacred fount," as R.P. Blackmur noted, "is the mystery of the power that passes among us, depleting or restoring us, in friendship, in love, even in more public relations .... [Here] is the beautiful, the critical job of making that mystery manifest."


Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162)

Henry James: Novels 1901-1902 (LOA #162)

Author: Henry James

Publisher: Library of America

Published: 2006-02-02

Total Pages: 754

ISBN-13: 9781931082884

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This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel. James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.


The Challenge of Bewilderment

The Challenge of Bewilderment

Author: Paul B. Armstrong

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1501722727

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The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of "bewilderment," an experience that challenges the reader’s very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade’s End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists’ attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they thematize the relation between the understanding of a fictional world and everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened awareness of the process of interpretation.


The Romance of Failure

The Romance of Failure

Author: Jonathan Auerbach

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 019505721X

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Auerbach's book explores the fictions of three 19th-century writers--Poe, Hawthorne, and James--in which the first-person narrator is both the central actor and the retrospective teller of tale, at once hero and historian. Auerbach argues that first person is an attractive but dangerous form of self-revelation that foregrounds fundamental problems of literay representation such as how fiction come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.