Henry James's Feminist Afterlives - Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras

This book explores Henry James's negotiations with nineteenth-century ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and literary style through the responses of three women who have never before been substantively examined in light of their relationships to his work. Writing in different times and places, Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, and Marguerite Duras nevertheless share complex navigations of womanhood and authorship, as well as a history of feminist scholarly responses to their work. Kathryn Wichelns draws upon James' correspondence with Fields, as well as Dickinson's and Duras's revisions of his fiction, to offer a new understanding of gender-transgressive elements of his project.  By contextualizing his writing within a diverse set of feminist perspectives, each grounded in a specific time and place, as well as nineteenth-century views of queer male sexuality, Wichelns demonstrates the centrality of Henry James's ambivalent identifications with women tohis work.
 

List of contents

1 Introduction: On James, Mastery and Transgresion.- 2 "Those Who Know": Henry James and Annie Adams Fields.- 3 Emily Dickinson's Henry James.- 4 Henry James, French Feminist: Marguerite Duras's La Bête dans la jungle.- 5 Gender, Colonialism, and Italian Difference: Duras and The Aspern Papers.- 6 Conclusion: Towards a Queer Feminist James.            

 

About the author

Kathryn Wichelns is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.  

Product details

• Authors: Kathryn Wichelns
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 19.02.2019
• EAN: 9783319891071
• ISBN: 978-3-31-989107-1
• No. of pages: 178
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 10 mm x 210 mm
• Weight: 257 g
• Illustrations: XI, 178 p.
• Series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Literaturtheorie, Europa, B, Literatur: Geschichte und Kritik, Literaturwissenschaft: 1900 bis 2000, Literature, Portrait of a Lady, Turn of the Screw, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Literary theory, European Literature, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, British literature, British and Irish Literature, Literature—Philosophy, Henry James Travel Writing, lesbianism in Henry James, Henry James and Queer Theory, The Aspern Papers, colonialism and Henry James