Henry James and the Philosophical Novel breaks fresh ground by examining James's unique position as a philosophical novelist, closely associated with the climate of ideas generated by his brother William. It considers storytelling as a mode of philosophical enquiry, showing how a range of distinguished thinkers have relied on fictional narrative as a technique for formulating and clarifying their ideas; and investigates (with close reference to his novels) the affiliations between James's practice as a novelist and contemporary epistemological, moral, and linguistic concerns.
This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.
This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family.
A collection of "the most important" of Henry James' Prefaces; "his studies of Hawthorne, George Eliot, Balzac, Zola, de Maupassant, Turgenev, Sainte-Beuve, and Arnold; and his essays on the function of criticism and the future of the novel."--P. [4] of cover.
Writer Henry James (1843-1916) was born in America but preferred to live in Europe; he finally become a British subject near the end of his life. His status as a permanent outsider is responsible for the recurring themes in his writing dealing with European sophistication (decadence) compared to American lack of sophistication (or innocence). He is respected in modern times for his psychological insight, for being able to reveal his characters' deepest motivations. These 11 essays, along with an introduction and an afterword, examine James's work through the prism of the author's latest style. Topics the contributing authors address include the Henry James revival of the 1930s, three of James's male aesthetics, women in his works, literary forgery, and parallels with the career and views of Margaret Oliphant. Three essays delve into issues of representation in art and fiction, then three more explore decadence, identity and homosexuality.
Employing a wide range of interpretive and theoretical approaches, this collection brings together distinguished James scholars from four continents to elicit new and exciting readings of a diverse array of James’s fiction and non-fiction. Through their transformative acts, the essays investigate James’s life-long engagement with cities, places, and tourist sites; offer theoretically informed readings of his work’s textual richness; and explore his intricate involvement with social and cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, economics, friendship and hospitality, and visual culture. Arranged under rubrics which signal the complex interrelations of Henry James as a historical individual and of the works he authored with a web of social, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses, the contributions collected in this book make a convincing case for the ongoing productivity of James’s oeuvre when interrogated from new critical angles and, therefore, for its enduring centrality to the concerns of literary and cultural studies.
Henry James’s Daisy Miller was an immediate sensation when it was first published in 1878 and has remained popular ever since. In this novella, the charming but inscrutable young American of the title shocks European society with her casual indifference to its social mores. The novella was popular in part because of the debates it sparked about foreign travel, the behaviour of women, and cultural clashes between people of different nationalities and social classes. This Broadview edition presents an early version of James’s best-known novella within the cultural contexts of its day. In addition to primary materials about nineteenth-century womanhood, foreign travel, medicine, philosophy, theatre, and art—some of the topics that interested James as he was writing the story—this volume includes James’s ruminations on fiction, theatre, and writing, and presents excerpts of Daisy Miller as he rewrote it for the theatre and for a much later and heavily revised edition.
"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil. This edition includes an afterword written by William Gass in 1997. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Henry James and the Philosophical Novel breaks fresh ground by examining James's unique position as a philosophical novelist, closely associated with the climate of ideas generated by his brother William. It considers storytelling as a mode of philosophical enquiry, showing how a range of distinguished thinkers have relied on fictional narrative as a technique for formulating and clarifying their ideas; and investigates (with close reference to his novels) the affiliations between James's practice as a novelist and contemporary epistemological, moral, and linguistic concerns.
