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Henry James's Thwarted Love (Paperback)
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Henry James's Thwarted Love (Paperback)
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This provocative book argues that in his fiction Henry James was
more canny about sexual identities, more focused on sexual
pleasure, and more insistent on flouting heterosexual convention
than has been acknowledged by his critics and biographers. Without
leaping to the construction of a "gay" Henry James, whose writings
aver a conscious sexual preference, the author demonstrates James's
deep engagement with the construct of sexual "inversion," his
familiarity with the tropes and traffic of the late-Victorian
sexual underground, and his resistance to the cultural codes and
institutions that disciplined social and private behavior.
The volume aligns biographical and textual readings with specific
topics in intellectual and cultural history, placing the novelist
and his works within the key discursive frameworks that emerged
during his lifetime: mental hygiene, sexology, psychiatry, and
cultural anthropology. In reconsidering James's reputed celibacy
and effeminacy, the author makes use of recent gender and queer
theory, while remaining carefully attentive to the contemporary
terms at James's disposal for understanding his own sexuality and
gender identification.
The author also elaborates the family dynamics that affected
James's gender and professional identity conflicts, notably his
turbulent relations with his brother William James, whose
pathologizing of the "unhygienic" creative life conditioned his
thinking about both sexuality and art. Extended discussions of four
novels--"Roderick Hudson," "The Bostonians," "The Princess
Casamassima," and "The Wings of the Dove"--underscore James's
resistance to the disciplinary mechanisms that regulate homoerotic
desire under the aegis of mental hygiene and sexual
"responsibility." Understanding, with queer theory, that
sublimation can be a form of pleasure in a non-heterosexual
community, the book views James's erotic economy of artistic
production--even as it increasingly emphasized self-discipline--as
a means of circumventing the suppression of sexual nonconformity.
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