AMERICAN LITERATURE—

HENRY JAMES
劉涵英
 OVERVIEW

“Literary Master”
Tales, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, criticism, travel pieces,
letters, reviews, biographies as many as one hundred volumes.
Highly cultivated characters.
The “international theme”
 EDUCATION

“sensuous education”
In England, Switzerland, and France Henry James and his siblings were
taken to galleries, libraries, museums, and theatres.
Attended Harvard Law School briefly in 1862 but decided that literature
was his calling.
 THREE LITERARY PERIODS (BY
LEON EDEL)

1. International Theme: the drama, comic and tragic, of Americans in

Europe and occasionally of Europeans in America.
2. Experimenting with diverse themes and forms: novels dealing with the
social and political currents of the 1870s and 1880s; theater; shorter
fictions exploring the relationship of artists to society; the troubled
psyches of oppressed children.
3. “Major phase”: international and cosmopolitan subjects in elaborately
complex narratives of great epistemological and moral challenge to
readers.
 THE “INTERNATIONAL THEME”

The naïve young American in conflict with the traditions, customs, and
values of the Old World. Ex. Daisy Miller, the “new” American girl.
Henry James was neither a chauvinist for America nor a resentful émigré
but a true cosmopolitan concerned with exploring American national
character as it is tested by cultural displacement.
Self-sacrifice for the sake of principle: renunciation is a form of self-
expression.
 THE “LIMITED POINT OF VIEW”
THE RETREATED NARRATOR

In Daisy Miller: The viewpoint of a character who is limited by self-

absorption and class position and who is unable to see Daisy for who she is.
This narrative device, described by Percy Lubbock as the use of a “focal
character” became an important part of James’ technique.
Henry James increasingly removed himself as controlling narrator this
heightened emphasis on showing rather than telling room for ambiguity
and psychological complexity.
 LATER WORKS

Returning to the “international theme”

American innocence, at this point, becomes only a willful refusal to see,
while awareness (of one’s character and others’) would provide the wisdom
to escape the disaster—however, it usually comes too late, leaving the
characters with only the insight.