Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics

by Edited by Gert Buelens

• ISBN13: 9780521570893
• ISBN10: 0521570891
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-02-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Jamesian mode of writing, it has been claimed, actively works against an understanding of the way truth, history and power circulate in his texts. In this collection of essays, leading scholars of James analyse the strategies James used to address these crucial issues. Enacting History in Henry James claims that, because the type of knowledge available in James's fiction is never of a cognitive kind, the reader can never know 'truth' in any verifiable sense. James's writing instead promises an experiential type of knowledge, one that is attained by participating in the power games and moral dramas that unfold within the text. This collection argues that reading James ultimately requires not just an emotional responsiveness, but also an ethical assumption of responsibility for the act of reading. By placing James's work in a fresh theoretical context, this book throws fresh light on this most enigmatic of writers.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	xi	(2)
Acknowledgments	xiii	(1)
List of abbreviations	xiv
Introduction	1	(15)
Gert Buelens
1 Power relations in the novels of James: the `liberal' and the `radical' version	16	(24)
Winfried Fluck
2 Multiple germs, metaphorical systems, and moral fluctuation in The Ambassadors	40	(21)
Richard A. Hocks
3 James and the ethics of control: aspiring architects and their floating creatures	61	(14)
Sarah B. Daugherty
4 James and the shadow of the Roman Empire: manners and the consenting victim	75	(18)
Adrian Poole
5 What Maisie Knew: Henry James's Bildungsroman of the artist as queer moralist	93	(16)
Alfred Habegger
6 The double narrative of `The Beast in the Jungle': ethical plot, ironical plot, and the play of power	109	(17)
Michiel W. Heyns
7 Homoeroticism, identity, and agency in James's late tales	126	(22)
Hugh Stevens
8 `A provision full of responsibilities': senses of the past in Henry James's fourth phase	148	(18)
David McWhirter
9 Possessing the American scene: race and vulgarity, seduction and judgment	166	(27)
Gert Buelens
10 History, narrative, and responsibility: speech acts in `The Aspern Papers'	193	(18)
J. Hillis Miller
Index	211