Henry James's last romance : making sense of the past and the American scene
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Bibliographic Information
Henry James's last romance : making sense of the past and the American scene
（Cambridge studies in American literature and culture）
Cambridge University Press, 2009, c1997
- : pbk
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"First published 1997. This digitally printed version 2009"--T.p. verso
"Paperback re-issue"--Back cover
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this 1998 study of Henry James's classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past so that he could make culture work. In this record of James's 1904-5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralysing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between 'natives' and 'aliens', between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Although James has been represented as conservative by liberal critics, it is just such simplifying oppositions that his method of interpretation works to transform. Haviland's own metonymical method follows James's interpretative practice by bringing historical and theoretical readings of these texts into conversation with each other.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: at home: the reception of Henry James
- Part I. Henry James's Last Romance: The Sense of the Past: 1. The sense of the present
- 2. The sense of a happy ending
- Part II. Civilization and its Contents: The American Scene: 3. Making signs of the past: interpretation and C. S. Peirce
- 4. Waste makes taste: Classicism, conspicuous consumption, and Thorstein Veblen
- 5. 'Psychic Mulattos': the ambiguity of race and W. E. B. Du Bois
- 6. The return of the alien: Ethnic identity and Jakob A. Riis
- Part III. Patrimony and Matrimony: The Ivory Tower: 7. Heterosocial acts: the ambiguity of gender in the New World
- 8. Odd couples: Henry James Senior and Jacques Lacan
- 9. Irony makes love: Mrs Henry James and Washington, AC/DC.
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