Full Dissertation Entitled “The Concept of Reciprocity in Henry James‟s Fiction: A Sociological Approach” (2024)

The Henry James Review, 1994

Orbis Litterarum, 2018

This paper examines the role of ideology in the construction of absent characters in Henry James's short fiction against a methodological background of cognitive narratology and the attendant notions of metarepresentation, extended mind, and distributed identity. Building on the conviction that those minds which communally assemble absent characters by projecting subjective images of them do form identifiable ideological systems rather than arbitrary arrays, an approach to the construction of absent Louisa Brash in "The Beldonald Holbein" (1901) is made in the context of "Daisy Miller" (1878), "The Author of Beltraffio" (1884), and "The Next Time" (1895). Published in three different decades, these stories display absent and quasi-absent characters who are conjured up for the reader in much the same way as Mrs. Brash is, namely as functions of a priori ideological positions based on sequenced degrees of commitment to the thematic dominant of a tale, a process which often results in deeply conflicted identities.

International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2022

Henry James is a great novelist, dramatist and literary critic. During his writing career, he created many famous works and made great contributions to American and European literature. His The portrait of a lady is widely regarded as the most prominent work. In this novel, James explored cultural conflicts between the new land and Europe, and proposed his solution to cultural integration, which he named the ideal culture. The present study is to explore the ideal culture embodied in the novel from a cross-cultural perspective, as well as James's unique views on the resolution of cultural conflicts. The significance and value of this thesis lies in its role to help people understand the cultural diversity in the world, eliminate some people's biased conception of cultural centralism, and improve people's cross-cultural awareness in international communication by referring to the ideal culture presented in the novel.

Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 2018

humanities, 2021

Henry James’s self-allusions in “Pandora” have been read as a rewriting of his former treatment of the “American Girl abroad” in the comic mode. The hints at “a Tauchnitz novel by an American author” (90) establish an ironical reversal of the failures of understanding which had led to tragedy in “Daisy Miller.” Yet the ironies in “Pandora” are multi-layered, often self-reflexive,and can be further interpreted in the light of James’s controversial adaptation of his famous novella for the stage. In this framework, well-known Jamesian topoi appear both as a (self-)parody and a metaliterary dialogue James engages with his readers and critics. The author’s personal implication in this “American” story is further testified by his Notebooks, in which James states his intention to write about his friends Henry and “Clover” Adams. Indeed, “Pandora”’s multi-layered intertextuality includes undeclared references to Adams’s anonymously published novel, Democracy, a semi-satirical account of U.S. political life. My article focuses on the web of intertextual relations woven in this short story with a view to reflecting on James’s ideas concerning the politics of authorship, readership, literary success, and the fate of the American Girl.

College Literature, 2016

With his handful of works, a well-known American expatriate novelist and essayist, Henry James made us familiar with the transition process in the USA to modernism as an author witnessing both late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After experiencing a long period of puritanical order and remaining stuck in the strictly established moral rules of American society, with its earlier conservative crust with the start of the new century. James shed light on this process and reflected clearly the transition period in his well-acclaimed fiction, The Ambassadors. In this study, we scrutinize The Ambassadors by Henry James with respect to the comparisons made between Paris and Woollett or in a bigger scope Europe and America. As he spent most of his life commuting between the Old and New worlds, James demonstrated to us his impressions and observations of these places in hereby handled fiction through the eye of his protagonist and narrator, Strether. This study projects on the reasons pushing James to make such type of distinctions between Woollet and Paris and intends to present the value of these different geographies for James.Key words: Artistic Life, Henry James, Morality, Paris, Transformation.

The Henry James Review, 2012

This essay outlines an unorthodox literary genealogy. By examining the vestiges of the sentimental plot in Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton it demonstrates that domestic fiction, written primarily by a cluster of American women authors in the nineteenth century, played a formative role in the advent of literary modernism. While the novel displays James's evolving focus on perception, it simultaneously reflects on sentimental ideology as a cultural and literary phenomenon, satirizing the domestic genre even while memorializing it. In James's generic conversions, the domestic interiors devoutly composed by sentimental authors emerge as models for the ornate psychic interiorities fashioned by modernist investigations of consciousness.

Women's Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, 2022

This paper critiques the construction of the figure of American Eve and her transformation in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) vis-à-vis American and European socio-cultural norms. In so doing, this study argues how James’s own encounter, as an American expatriate, with the culture(s) of Europe shape his views on the role and position of the modern woman and, in turn, his depiction of the female protagonist, Isabel Archer. Different conceptualizations of the American Eve are offered and juxtaposed with its counterpart, the American Adam, as the embodiment of the American aspiration to live and experience the world autonomously and self-reliantly. It will be argued that when confronted with the reality of life, the ambitious, imaginative, and naïve American Eve cannot survive and, as such, needs to reshape herself according to the norms of European society, which espouse a conservative view of women’s role as “ladies” functioning ideally within the boundaries of the domestic space. Therefore, Isabel’s transformation materializes through her passage from American “innocence” to European “experience”, which enables her to save her marriage and regain control of her life. The final portrait of the “lady” is revealed when Isabel’s confrontation with the vicissitudes and exigencies of real life, and especially her deeply troubled marriage, empowers her to transcend her abstract, idealistic, and theory-ridden vision of life, and transfigure into a European(ized) version of the American Eve.

Henry James Review, 2021

Taking Pierre Bourdieu's interpretation of Flaubert's Sentimental Education as a model, this article reads Portrait of a Lady as a representation of the international literary field in which Henry James sought to achieve a position in the 1870s and 1880s. James's prise de position is enacted in the marriage plot, and is centered around his rejection of the highly autonomous but immoral French novel of Flaubert and his school. The subject matter of Portrait is then James's quest for the literary autonomy of the English novel, which Isabel Archer ideally embodies.

Journal of Modern Literature, 2007

This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fiction—specifically, in Colm Tóibín's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty—to James's conflicted, often queer responses to the private and the public. Tóibín and Lodge, in divergent ways, trace through James, the failed dramatist, their own ambivalences about biographical fiction's private-public play. For Tóibín, James's life and writing offer figures for the queer author's efforts to probe, complicate, and even conceal hom*oerotic desire. Lodge's novel remains haunted by a queer specter of James even as it places disembodied devotion at the centre of James's and the fictional biographer's art. While Hollinghurst's novel invokes James as a background presence, James's vexed attitudes toward publicity and privacy and his stylistic excess illuminate the novel's attention to the "guest" status of gay aesthetics in the heteronormative public sphere of Thatcherite Britain.

English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Continuity and Change, 1992

Journal of International Social Research, 2016

The Henry James Review, 2014

Reading The Wings of the Dove and Italian Hours (1909), there are times when James’s style of writing can feel like an ongoing project designed to rewire the workings of a reader’s pleasure. In doing so, James reinvigorates our understanding of the innate eroticism present in the acts of reading and writing. This short essay identifies and explains some of the most noticeable aspects of the erotics of Jamesian style as it appears in two of his works and demonstrates how this erotics forces his readers to take pleasure in the deferral of pleasure.

Portable Property, 2008

The Henry James Review, 2013

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2011