Henry James's Permanent Adolescence

by Bradley, John R.

• ISBN13: 9780333918746
• ISBN10: 0333918746
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-12-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Henry James remained throughout his life focused on his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on younger boys and men, and John R. Bradley illustrates how it is in the context of such narcissism that James consistently dealt with male desire in his fiction. He also traces a more subtle but related trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist gay discourse, which in turn is shown to have been paralleled by a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical book, which covers the whole of James's career, will quickly be recognized as a defining text in this emerging field of James studies.

Author Biography

John R. Bradley is an Independent Scholar.

Table of Contents

Textual Note	ix
List of Abbreviations	xi
Critical Hostility	1	(12)
Defining James's Homosexuality	13	(18)
Whitman, Pater and the Importance of Being Manly in James's Early Fiction	31	(44)
John Addington Symonds and `The Author of Beltraffio'	75	(16)
Public Scandals, Private Dilemmas	91	(34)
The Uses of Obscurity	125	(16)
Notes	141	(14)
Bibliography	155	(6)
Index	161