Henry James and the visual / by Kendall Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Kendall, 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

James, Henry, 1843-1916--Criticism and interpretation.

James, Henry.

James, Henry, 1843-1916.

Visual perception in literature.

Self-perception in literature.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature.

Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xv, 246 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Summary:

In the decades after the Civil War, how did Americans see the world and their place in it? Kendall Johnson argues that Henry James appealed to his readers' sense of vision to dramatize the ambiguity of American citizenship in scenes of tense encounter with Europeans. By reviving the eighteenth-century debates over beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, James weaves into his narratives the national politics of emancipation, immigration, and Indian Removal. For James, visual experience is crucial to the American communal identity, a position that challenged prominent anthropologists as they defined concepts of race and culture in ways that continue to shape how we see the world today. To demonstrate the cultural stereotypes that James reworked, the book includes twenty illustrations from periodicals of the nineteenth century. This study reaches startling new conclusions, not just about James but about the way America defined itself through the arts in the nineteenth century.

Contents:

Introduction: the cultural varieties of visual experience 1

1 Classifying Donatello: the visual aesthetics of American exceptionalism 25

2 A "dark spot" in the picturesque: the aesthetics of polygenism in "A Landscape-Painter" 60

3 Rules of engagement: the arch-romance of visual culture in The American 85

4 The scarlet feather: racial phantasmagoria in What Maisie Knew 123

5 Pullman's progress: the politics of the picturesque in The American Scene 155

Epilogue: America seen 189.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-240) and index.

ISBN:

9780521880664

0521880661

OCLC:

122526167

Online:

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