| Description |
viii, 205 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-203) and index. |
| Contents |
Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 'Just you wait!': reflections on the last chapters of The Portrait of a Lady -- As charming as a charming story': governesses in What Maisie Knew and 'The Turn of the Screw' -- 'The sacred terror': The Awkward Age and James's men of the world -- Blushing in the dark: language and sex in The Ambassadors -- Poor girls with their rent to pay: class in 'In the Cage'and The Wings of the Dove -- 'A house of quiet': privileges and pleasures in The Golden Bowl -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. |
| Summary |
"Tessa Hadley examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralising frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. Hadley argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping him to leave behind a way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the 1890s as explorations of how disabling and distorting ideals of women's goodness and purity were learned and perpetuated within English and American cultural processes. These explorations, Hadley argues, liberated James to write the great heterosexual love affairs of the late novels, with their emphasis on the power of pleasure and play: themes which are central to James's ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure-class society."--BOOK JACKET. |
| Subject |
James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Imagination in literature.
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Pleasure in literature.
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| ISBN |
0521811694 |
|
9780521811699 |
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