Analysis of Henry James's Works
New World Ghosts (Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’)
You might remember the image from the first lecture on the module: 70th birthday portrait (1913) of HJ by John Singer Sargent in the National Portrait Gallery.
PP2
Five years earlier, ‘The Jolly Corner’ was published in the English Review (December 1908). HJ first had the idea in August 1906.
There are different definitions of the short story. But if we follow The Complete Tales of HJ, ed. by Leon Edel, it was HJ’s 108th published story. And he only had 5 left to write.
So JC is very late HJ. He was 65 when it came out. He wasn’t to complete another novel, though he left two unpublished at his death on 28 February 1916 – The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past. In those last eight years his main achievements were the Prefaces to the NY edition, and two volumes of autobiography: A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother.
As I suggested last week, James’s Prefaces to the NY edition offer one important way of understanding Gothic literature. HJ wrote about the ghost story in the Preface to Vol XII (TS) and Vol XVII (the other ghost stories).
PP3
But his Preface to an early novel, The American, is also relevant. HJ doesn’t mention Gothic, but he does talk – as Hawthorne and Walpole before him had done – about ‘romance’ (if you do The Romance of Fiction next year, you will probably return to this famous passage).
James here draws a distinction between fiction which surrounds itself with ‘the air of romance’ and fiction which is anchored in ‘the element of reality’. There are no hard and fast distinctions here, and James says that writers like Scott, Balzac and Zola committed themselves both to romance and to realism: these `rich and mixed’ writers washed us `with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock … of the far and strange’. At a later point in the Preface he adds that `it is as difficult … to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic
You might remember the image from the first lecture on the module: 70th birthday portrait (1913) of HJ by John Singer Sargent in the National Portrait Gallery.
PP2
Five years earlier, ‘The Jolly Corner’ was published in the English Review (December 1908). HJ first had the idea in August 1906.
There are different definitions of the short story. But if we follow The Complete Tales of HJ, ed. by Leon Edel, it was HJ’s 108th published story. And he only had 5 left to write.
So JC is very late HJ. He was 65 when it came out. He wasn’t to complete another novel, though he left two unpublished at his death on 28 February 1916 – The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past. In those last eight years his main achievements were the Prefaces to the NY edition, and two volumes of autobiography: A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother.
As I suggested last week, James’s Prefaces to the NY edition offer one important way of understanding Gothic literature. HJ wrote about the ghost story in the Preface to Vol XII (TS) and Vol XVII (the other ghost stories).
PP3
But his Preface to an early novel, The American, is also relevant. HJ doesn’t mention Gothic, but he does talk – as Hawthorne and Walpole before him had done – about ‘romance’ (if you do The Romance of Fiction next year, you will probably return to this famous passage).
James here draws a distinction between fiction which surrounds itself with ‘the air of romance’ and fiction which is anchored in ‘the element of reality’. There are no hard and fast distinctions here, and James says that writers like Scott, Balzac and Zola committed themselves both to romance and to realism: these `rich and mixed’ writers washed us `with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock … of the far and strange’. At a later point in the Preface he adds that `it is as difficult … to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic