Henry James: The Young Master
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Publisher Description
As if Henry James himself were guiding us, we visit old Calvinist New York in the mid-nineteenth century, and share the coming-of-age of a young man whose boldness of spirit and profound capacity for affection attract both men and women to him. We journey with James through Italy and France, witness his first love affair in Paris, and settle with him in London at the height of Empire in the Victorian Age. We scale the heights of London society with him, and as the world opens to James we share with him the experience of writing a series of celebrated and successful novels, culminating with Washington Square (on which the play The Heiress is based) and his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady. The Washington Post Book World notes: “It is no small ambition to write a biography of James that is commensurate with that master, and Sheldon Novick has done it.”
“Splendidly written . . . Novick has aimed to bring James back to life and he has succeeded brilliantly.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“Like a movie of James’s life, as it unfold moment to moment.”
–The New York Times
“Masterful in bringing James and his world to life.”
–San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
“Beautifully written, with a grace that enables [Sheldon Novick] to weave his subject’s words in and out of his own with a properly Jamesian suavity . . . Novick’s account gives one a profound respect for James’s persistence and power of will.”
–The New Republic
NOTE: This edition does not include a photo insert.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Opening in self-consciously literary fashion, Novick's life of James takes him into 1881, when he is an expatriate of 38 and The Portrait of a Lady establishes the novelist's transatlantic reputation. Novick (Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes), a law professor, abjures the psychoanalytic approaches of Leon Edel and Fred Kaplan and is more explicit than his predecessors in seeing suggestions in James's fiction of an "audacious" eroticism. To Novick, it may not be merely authorial imagination that generates James's exploitation of the theme of "the moral correctness of a love that may be contrary to convention; and the... immorality of loves that are perfectly conventional." By the close of this first part of a two-volume life, James has focused in his fiction on a "spontaneous moral sense that would be the distinctive American trait in the stories and novels." To give it reality, he developed his formula of the encounter of America with Europe: "the testing of the new type against the older races." Concurrent with the international theme, James himself became a confessed "cosmopolite" comfortable in European capitals and a committed "amiable bachelor." Novick sees these convergences in James's professional and emotional life as leaving the writer confident rather than neurotic, settled rather than imperiled. Not nearly as contrary to Kaplan's 1992 one-volume Henry James as some pages imply, Novick's biography will nevertheless stir controversy about the relationship of James's personality to his creativity. Illustrations not seen by PW.
