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Henry James as a Biographer - A Self Among Others (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,139
Discovery Miles 41 390
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Henry James as a Biographer - A Self Among Others (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in Major Literary Authors
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Total price: R4,159
Discovery Miles: 41 590
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This study of Henry James's biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and
William Wetmore Story offers an argument that he deserves greater
recognition for his contributions to the development of biography,
based on his implicit theory of biography, found in his critical
commentary and on these two complicated and ultimately artistically
innovative performances in the genre. Although James maintained an
ambivalent relationship to the art of biography, in his reviews,
criticism, letters and fiction, he wrote about biography from a
core of aesthetic conviction that constitutes an informal poetics.
It is necessary thus to scrutinize the ways in which James's
theoretical convictions, particularly his insistence on artistic
unity, fail him when he writes two biographies himself. Both
"Hawthorne" (1879) and "William Wetmore Story and His"
"Friends"(1903) fail to cohere in the way traditional biographies
achieve unity. Neither work has at its center a dynamic and fully
dimensional apprehension of the biographical subject. Instead James
violates one of his own essential biographical tenets. He usurps
his subject and places himself at the center of what should be a
narrative of his subject's life. The results fall short of fully
achieved biography, but they do not fall short of literary
interest. In order to write these books according to his own
genius, James had to reinvent the form. They are rife with
innovations, chief among them his great experimentation with
narrative point of view, here brought to bear on biography. This
concept and others survey the terrain for the important
biographical practitioners and theorists who follow him. For this
reason, a special place must be found for James in pantheon of
experimental biographers.
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