In The Other Henry James, John Carlos Rowe offers a new vision of
Henry James as a social critic whose later works can now be read as
rich with homoerotic suggestiveness. Drawing from recent work in
queer and feminist theory, Rowe argues that the most fruitful
approach to James today is one that ignores the elitist portrait of
the formalist master in favor of the writer as a vulnerable critic
of his own confused and repressive historical moment. Rowe traces a
particular development in James's work, showing how in his early
writings James criticized women's rights, same-sex relations, and
other social and political trends now identified with modern
culture; how he ambivalently explored these aspects of modernity in
his writings of the 1880s; and, later, how he increasingly
identified with such modernity in his heretofore largely ignored or
marginally treated fiction of the 1890s. Building on recent
scholarship that has shown James to be more anxious about gender
roles, more conflicted, and more marginal a figure than previously
thought, Rowe argues that James-through his treatment of women,
children, and gays-indicts the values and conventions of the
bourgeoisie. He shows how James confronts social changes in gender
roles, sexual preferences, national affiliations, and racial and
ethnic identifications in such important novels as The American,
The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew, and In the Cage, and in such
neglected short fiction as "The Last of the Valerii," "The Death of
the Lion," and "The Middle Years." Positioning James's work within
an interpretive context that pits the social and political
anxieties of his day against the imperatives of an aesthetic
ideology, The Other Henry James will engage scholars, students, and
teachers of American literature and culture, gay literature, and
queer theory.
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