Henry James's Style of Retrospect
Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23797186 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Oliver Herford (0000-0002-4697-6573, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Publication date | 2016-06-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Henry James's Style of Retrospect (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198734802.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W4230212249 |
| ISBN | 9780198734802 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
This book examines Henry James’s engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and analyses the changes his style underwent as he gradually turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and as the balance of his literary output shifted correspondingly from fiction to non-fiction. James’s ‘late personal writings’ are a retrospective non-fictional works: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. The book proposes that we understand these apparently heterogeneous writings as an imaginatively coherent sequence that enacts a principled commitment on James’s part to personal, historical, and stylistic continuity, and reflects the innovative dynamism of his newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. On this basis the book offers a revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. Interlinked close readings take the major works of this period in chronological order, addressing a key point of style in each. Particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected in analyses of James’s late work. Henry James’s Style of Retrospect asks what it means for a great novelist to embrace a different literary mode in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.
Art · Art history · Literature · Style (visual arts) · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.83 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2021 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |