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Cours Année : 1984

Henry JAMES: The Bostonians

Résumé

H. JAMES : THE BOSTONIANS James's art before The Bostonians The Bostonians 1 was published in 1886, in the same year as The Princess Casamassima, which forms a sort of companion piece to the former. Both novels are set apart from James's other works "by having in common a quick responsiveness to the details of the outer worId, an explicit awareness of history, of the grosser movements of society and civilization." (L. Trilling, The Opposing Self). Unlike the preceding novels-Roderick Hudson (1875); The American (1877); The Europeans (1878), etc.-neither of them deals with the "international situation" which had so far provided the subject of his early works. What is the "international situation"? The phrase refers to what one might call "the mutual interrogation of America and Europe" (R. Hudson p. XXII). The confrontation of the distinctively American outlook and the distinctively European outlook, which lies at the heart of nearly all of James's fiction, was his great discovery for the American novel. H. James was an American, of Irish antecedents, but America seemed to him a continent too immature for the production of great literature, while Europe was ancient and ripe with tradition; it also represented for him, as a critic pointed out, that romantic "otherness" which seemed to be necessary to him as an artist. In a way, one might say that H. James exemplified a unique case of "divided loyalty" hence the contradiction that is the motive power of his fiction writing. H. James was drawn to the international setting by temperament and training, as well as by what he judged to be the particular aesthetic requirements of the novel. In his study of N. Hawthorne, James had occasion to subscribe to the latter's statement that: "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there ls no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land."

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hal-03109074 , version 1 (13-01-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03109074 , version 1

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Paul Carmignani. Henry JAMES: The Bostonians. Master. Préparation Agrégation/Capes, Université de Perpignan-Via Domitia, France. 1984, pp.33. ⟨hal-03109074⟩

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