1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Henry James 'Äì A Critical Study," Ford Madox Ford presents a profound exploration of the literary contributions of one of America's most notable writers. Eschewing mere biographical recounting, Ford delves into the complexities of James's narrative techniques, style, and themes. The book is articulated through a sophisticated blend of critique and homage, contextualizing James within the broader fabric of modernist literature and illuminating the innovative subtleties that define his oeuvre. Ford's incisive observations and nuanced understanding establish this study as not only a tribute but also a vital academic text that resonates with both literary scholars and casual readers alike. Ford Madox Ford, an influential figure in early 20th-century literature, experienced firsthand the transition from Victorian to modernist sensibilities. As a contemporary of James, Ford's literary endeavors were shaped by an intimate awareness of the evolving narrative forms and psychological depth championed by his subject. His perspective is informed by both friendship and admiration, leading to an insightful analysis that captures the essence of James's literary genius. "Henry James 'Äì A Critical Study" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the intricacies of literary modernism. Ford's eloquent examination invites readers to appreciate James's enduring relevance, making this work an indispensable companion for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of classic literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Henry James -- A critical study
Table of Contents
Introduction
A craftsman bends over the lens of the novel, adjusting it until consciousness itself comes into focus and the smallest moral vibration is made visible to the attentive eye.
Henry James — A Critical Study endures as a classic because it is a lucid, historically situated meditation on how fiction achieves its most delicate effects. Written by a major novelist and editor steeped in the emerging modernist sensibility, it helped translate James’s intricate art for readers poised between Victorian certainties and twentieth-century experiment. Its durability lies in the way it marries sympathy with clarity, neither diminishing James’s difficulty nor surrendering to it, and in how it paved a path for later criticism that treats narrative technique and moral perception as inseparable aspects of literary form.
Ford Madox Ford, a leading figure in early twentieth-century letters, wrote this study in the years before the First World War, when James’s career had reached its late, refined phase and critical debate about his achievement was intensifying. The book offers a sustained appraisal of James’s craft: the evolution of his style, his management of point of view, and his commitment to the drama of consciousness. Without rehearsing plots, it outlines the author’s central concerns—social nuance, choice, and responsibility—setting them within the broader history of the novel and the shifting expectations of readers and writers.
Ford’s purpose is to clarify rather than canonize. He aims to show how James makes meaning through structure and perspective, why his prose insists on exactness, and how that insistence enlarges the possibilities of fiction. The intention is practical and ethical at once: to teach the reader how to read James and to demonstrate what such reading reveals about human judgment. By tracing the logic of James’s artistic choices, Ford advances a case for the novel as a disciplined art—a medium where technical finesse is not ornament but the very vehicle of understanding.
The study proceeds by attentive scrutiny—of narrative positions, gradations of tone, and the choreography of scenes—in order to illuminate how effects are made. Ford writes as a practicing craftsman, sensitive to pacing, to the relation between character and setting, and to the economy of detail. He situates James’s methods alongside those of earlier and contemporary novelists, not to rank but to gauge differences of aim and result. This comparative tact allows readers to see the precision of James’s procedures and to recognize that refinement of technique can be a form of moral seriousness.
Historically, the book belongs to a transitional moment, when British and American fiction were turning from panoramic social canvases toward concentrated interiority. James’s preoccupation with the observer and the observed, with perception as action, had become newly consequential. Ford addresses this shift from within, articulating a theory of practice that anticipates much of twentieth-century narrative art. By emphasizing control of perspective and the selectiveness of detail, he helps to consolidate ideas that later critics would formalize, while maintaining a flexible, writerly intelligence that keeps the focus on how particular pages actually work.
Because it was written by a novelist for readers who love novels, the book speaks with unusual immediacy. Ford avoids academic scaffolding, preferring concrete instances and a steady attention to the felt movement of a paragraph or scene. He neither softens James’s difficulty nor exaggerates it; instead, he charts a path through the intricacy, showing how effort is repaid in comprehension and pleasure. The result is criticism that functions as apprenticeship: it trains the eye to notice choices, the ear to register cadence, and the mind to connect technique with the subtle economies of motive and restraint.
Central to Ford’s account are the themes that James pursued with unmatched patience: the ethics of attention, the pressures of society upon solitude, the friction of innocence with experience, and the tangled negotiations of power within intimacy. Ford stresses how James’s cosmopolitan imagination—its border crossings and its rooms set for conversation—creates a stage on which perception and responsibility are tested. He shows how James builds drama from minute discriminations, making the reader complicit in the work of inference. In this rendering, refinement is not retreat but a way of honoring complexity without recourse to simplification.
The study balances a generous portrait of the artist with a measured sense of limits, refusing both hagiography and easy dismissal. Ford recognizes the steep demands James makes—the slow accrual of significance, the obliquity of approach—and explains why those demands are integral to the effect. He also notes the risks of such a method: potential diffuseness, a remoteness from immediate event. By keeping both achievement and hazard in view, the book models an evaluative poise that is itself exemplary, inviting readers to sustain judgment without forfeiting curiosity or the capacity for surprise.
As a milestone in English-language criticism, the book helped stabilize James’s position in the lineage of the novel while making a case for techniques that would shape modern narrative. Later writers learned from its insistence that form is not a shell but a mode of thought, and that point of view is an ethical instrument. Its influence is felt not only in academic discourse but in the workshop of fiction, where questions about distance, selection, and scene remain central. In this sense, Ford’s study participates in the making of the very future it seeks to describe.
For contemporary readers, its relevance lies in the clarity with which it frames enduring questions: How does a story persuade? Where does responsibility sit within representation? What is gained by attending to consciousness at close range? In an age of compressed narratives and proliferating voices, Ford’s patient analysis reminds us that slowness can be revelatory and that complexity need not be obscure. The book offers tools for reading not only James but any writer who trades in implication and nuance, equipping us to parse the ethics and aesthetics of fiction in our own moment.
In sum, Henry James — A Critical Study presents a vision of the novel as an art of exactness and empathy, where the management of form becomes a way of thinking through human entanglement. Its themes—perception, choice, responsibility, and the shaping power of craft—continue to resonate because they underwrite how stories matter. Readers return to it for its steady intelligence, its practical tact, and its faith that difficulty can be a gift. The book endures not as a monument but as a living invitation to read better, and thus to see more fully what literature makes possible.
Synopsis
Ford Madox Ford’s Henry James: A Critical Study presents a sustained examination of Henry James’s achievement, arranged to show how his art developed from early promise to full mastery. Ford sets out a clear purpose: to consider James as a craftsman of the modern novel, rather than to narrate a complete biography. He frames James as an American by origin and European by temperament, whose career illuminates the possibilities of international experience in fiction. The study outlines its method, moving through successive phases of writing and recurring themes, and underscores the central concern with consciousness, moral choice, and the technical means by which narrative may render them.
Beginning with formative influences, Ford sketches James’s cosmopolitan upbringing, early travels, and entry into letters through reviews, tales, and travel writing. He emphasizes how early discipline and wide reading prepared James for sustained experiments in viewpoint and form. The international theme, already visible in apprenticeship tales, is shown as both subject and structure: character is tested at cultural crossings. Ford identifies James’s gradual turn away from external incident toward inner drama, while noting that the writer’s critical faculty, later codified in his prefaces, was present from the start. This opening section positions James’s temperament and aims before surveying the major works.
Ford then considers the first novels, including Roderick Hudson, The American, and early short fictions such as Daisy Miller and The Europeans. He highlights James’s method of placing Americans in Old World settings to expose manners, motives, and moral pressure. The focus lies on design and perspective: a limited vantage is used to organize scattered impressions into coherent scenes. Ford marks the emergence of characteristic procedures—scenic presentation, controlled ambiguity, and the testing of innocence—that will later be refined. Without dwelling on plot, he shows how these works establish James’s concern with perception as action, and how their virtues and unevenness anticipate later consolidation.
The study proceeds to the middle period, taking The Portrait of a Lady as a central achievement and aligning it with related explorations in The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Tragic Muse. Ford describes how James enlarges the social and psychological canvas while tightening control over point of view. He notes the movement from picturesque contrasts to densely organized moral situations, handled through a chosen center of consciousness. Political and artistic milieus broaden the range of subject, yet the emphasis remains on how character forms under pressure. This section stresses structural ingenuity, the deepening of analysis, and the persistent effort to marry breadth with exactness.
Ford devotes attention to James’s venture in the theater, culminating in the failure of Guy Domville, and describes its lasting effects on the novelist’s practice. The stage taught compression, scene-building, and the management of dialogue, even as public reception proved discouraging. According to Ford, the setback sharpened James’s sense of what fiction could do that drama could not. Returning to the novel, James adapted theatrical lessons into prose, building sequences of evocative, dramatized moments. The study treats this episode as a pivot: a chastening ordeal that clarified technical priorities, redirected energies, and prepared the ground for the concentrated method of the later masterpieces.
In discussing the late phase, Ford surveys The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl as culminating statements of James’s manner. He outlines their construction around select intelligences, the intricacy of moral negotiation, and the deliberate orchestration of scenes. The prose grows denser, the texture more reflective, but the method remains essentially dramatic, with meaning unfolding through gesture, nuance, and withheld information. Ford situates these novels alongside the author’s New York Edition revisions, relating practice to theory. He emphasizes continuity from earlier work while acknowledging the heightened rigor, showing how James refines complexity into an exact instrument for rendering experience.
Turning to shorter forms, Ford considers tales and novellas such as The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, and other studies of art, secrecy, and interpretation. He traces James’s handling of narrative filters and the purposeful use of ambiguity, whereby the reader is enlisted as collaborator. The ghostly, the editorial, and the intimate are treated as different avenues to the same end: testing the limits of knowledge and motive. Ford shows how brevity intensifies James’s scenic method, allowing a single situation to bear a full moral weight. The survey integrates these works with the novels, presenting a continuous evolution rather than a separate practice.
Ford analyzes the principles of craft articulated in James’s prefaces and demonstrated in the fiction: the central intelligence, the dramatic method, selection and omission, and the ethics of form. He places James in a lineage with French and Russian predecessors while distinguishing his particular discipline of viewpoint. Attention is paid to syntax, cadence, and the late style’s intricate periodicity, without losing sight of clarity of intention. Ford addresses common misunderstandings of difficulty by setting them against the demands of exact representation. He also records working habits and the relentless reviser’s conscience, treating style as the visible trace of moral and aesthetic scruple.
The study closes by assessing James’s place in modern literature and the responsibilities his example imposes on the novel. Ford presents him as a master of form who enlarged the genre’s capacity to register consciousness and moral event. He highlights James’s consistency of aim, steadiness of labor, and independence from fashion, while acknowledging the challenges posed to impatient reading. The concluding message underscores the novel as a high discipline requiring tact, patience, and integrity. Ford’s arrangement, from formation to culmination, leaves the impression of a coherent career, and invites readers to approach James with attention to method as the key to meaning.
Historical Context
Ford Madox Ford’s Henry James, A Critical Study appeared in London in 1913, in the late Edwardian moment when Britain still presided over a global empire yet sensed approaching rupture. The book’s time and place are those of metropolitan salons, circulating libraries, and an expanding newspaper press, but also of constitutional crises and suffrage campaigns. Ford writes as an Anglo-European critic in a capital that negotiated between aristocratic deference and democratic assertion. His subject, Henry James, had for years lived in Rye, Sussex, and embodied the transatlantic observer of manners. Thus, the study is situated at the hinge between Victorian certainties and the prewar, modern uncertainty visible in Europe’s tense diplomacy and in London’s volatile streets.
The study’s geography is triangular: London as imperial and cultural hub; Paris as continental index of taste and political upheaval; New York as emblem of modern money and velocity. By 1913, steamships and telegraphs had shortened distance, and the Anglo-American traffic of people, capital, and ideas had created a single conversation about class, property, and personal freedom. The British Parliament Act of 1911, the rise of mass-circulation newspapers, and the militancy of the suffragettes framed debates that Ford brought to his reading of James. The book belongs to an age still haunted by the Franco-Prussian War and already shadowed by the Balkan crises that presaged the Great War.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877) formed the moral background of Henry James’s youth. The conflict cost approximately 620,000 lives, led to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and produced the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. James, born in New York City in 1843, did not serve after suffering an early back injury; his adulthood, however, unfolded amid a society reconstituting citizenship, labor, and regional identity. Ford reads James’s cool, judicial temperament against this upheaval, arguing that a writer formed by a republic’s fratricidal war and its aftermath would develop a scrupulous inquiry into conscience, power, and the costs of social belonging displayed throughout the novels.
The Gilded Age in the United States (circa 1870–1900) produced railroads, heavy industry, trusts, and fortunes associated with names like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan. The Panic of 1873 ushered in a global depression; the Panic of 1893 triggered bank failures and mass unemployment. New York’s Fifth Avenue mansions and Newport’s cottages of marble symbolized a moneyed class seeking legitimacy through art, philanthropy, and European connections. Ford situates James’s interest in inheritance, trusteeship, and the moral uses of wealth within this environment, reading novels such as The American and later works as anatomies of plutocratic will encountering the older etiquettes and property regimes of Europe.
The so called Dollar Princess phenomenon, peaking between the 1870s and the eve of the First World War, saw scores of American heiresses marry into the British and European nobility. Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874 and became mother to Winston Churchill; Consuelo Vanderbilt wed the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1895, bringing a reported dowry exceeding two million dollars and capital for the upkeep of Blenheim Palace; Mary Leiter of Chicago married George Curzon, future Viceroy of India, in 1895. Historians estimate that more than a hundred American women married British titled men between 1870 and 1914, transactions entwined with entail, estate debts, and the British landed class’s need for liquidity. British estates, burdened by agricultural depression and death duties, exchanged titles and social prestige for American cash; American families pursued status, political access, and cultural consecration overseas. London, Paris, and country houses from Marlborough to Scotland became stages for negotiations of contract, consent, and culture. Ford, writing in London, recognized that James’s international theme was not an abstraction but a ledger of concrete social trades. The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl register the legal instruments of settlement, the moral intricacies of guardianship, and the sentimental costs of alliance across currencies and customs. In Ford’s account, James tracks how citizenship, class, and intimacy are recast when Old World scarcity meets New World abundance, exposing both the brittleness of aristocratic hierarchies and the aggressive innocence of American wealth. The phenomenon provides the historical machinery that turns James’s dramas of choice into case studies in transatlantic political economy.
British electoral reform reshaped the political stage James observed. The Second Reform Act of 1867, steered by Disraeli, roughly doubled the English and Welsh electorate, extending the vote to many urban working men. The Third Reform Act of 1884, under Gladstone, extended similar rights to rural laborers, followed by the Redistribution Act of 1885. These measures produced new constituencies, party machines, and a modern House of Commons. Ford links this background to James’s The Tragic Muse, where parliamentary life, party discipline, and the competing claims of art and public duty reflect the post reform world’s pressures, demonstrating how representation and responsibility became aesthetic as well as civic problems.
Late Victorian London’s social question emerged starkly in the East End. Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) mapped poverty with statistical precision, while the Whitechapel murders of 1888, attributed to Jack the Ripper, publicized urban vulnerability. Overcrowded rookeries, sweated labor, and charity organization debates marked the decade. Ford sees James’s The Princess Casamassima engaging this landscape: the hero’s crossings between West End opulence and East End hardship mirror the city’s fracture lines. The novel’s attention to working class clubs, clandestine meetings, and moral temptation is read as an inquiry into how modern capitals concentrate wealth, spectacle, and despair within contiguous neighborhoods.
Anarchist and socialist agitation in the 1880s and 1890s formed a transatlantic climate of fear and reform. The Haymarket affair in Chicago on 4 May 1886 ended with deaths and controversial executions in 1887; in Europe, President Sadi Carnot of France was assassinated in 1894, Spanish premier Cánovas del Castillo in 1897, Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, and King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. London hosted exiles and clubs watched by police. Ford interprets The Princess Casamassima as James’s measured response to such militancy, staging the conflict between aesthetic vocation and revolutionary discipline and treating terror as a social symptom rather than a romantic solution.
The rise of the New Journalism transformed publicity and power. W. T. Stead’s 1885 Maiden Tribute exposé helped prompt the Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16, while Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, founded in 1896, pioneered mass circulation and sensational tactics. Investigations, libel suits, and celebrity trials fed a culture of exposure. Ford reads James’s The Reverberator and related tales of privacy invaded as historically grounded critiques of a press that commercialized intimacy and converted homes into headlines. The connection is not only thematic: James’s social world and friendships were increasingly subject to journalistic scrutiny, a condition Ford presents as corrosive of both manners and liberty.
The Franco Prussian War of 1870–1871, including the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune of March to May 1871, dislodged many artists and writers. James, resident in Paris before the war, withdrew to London as armies advanced and the city convulsed. The conflict’s swift German victory altered European balances, birthed the German Empire at Versailles in January 1871, and left deep French resentments. Ford treats James’s eventual English domicile and his preference for British civil order as responses to the memory of continental volatility. The novels’ disciplined interiors and ceremonial visits often appear, in Ford’s telling, as havens designed against the memory of barricades.
The Second Boer War (1899–1902) tested British imperial conscience. Guerrilla tactics, scorched earth policies, and civilian concentration camps drew condemnation, notably through Emily Hobhouse’s 1901 report; over twenty thousand Boer civilians died in the camps. Domestic debates over empire’s costs intensified. Ford situates James’s late phase within this milieu of contesting narratives about national purpose and humane governance. While James did not novelize the war, his letters and essays register distaste for jingoism, and the late fiction’s elite salons acquire a brittle, embattled quality. Ford reads that tonal pressure as the cultural echo of an empire negotiating between prestige and moral liability.
Women’s rights advanced through law and agitation. In Britain the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 allowed wives to own and control property; the Women’s Social and Political Union, founded in 1903, adopted militancy. In 1913 Emily Wilding Davison died after stepping onto the track at the Epsom Derby. In the United States, suffrage campaigns built toward the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920. Ford connects James’s heroines and The Bostonians’ reformers to these shifts, noting that autonomy, contract, and the politics of consent underpin plots about marriage settlements and guardianship. The novels’ choices dramatize legal and social transitions measurable in statutes and headlines.
American urban modernity accelerated between 1890 and 1910. Ellis Island opened in 1892 and processed over twelve million arrivals by mid century, with peak years before the Great War. Trusts consolidated industries; U.S. Steel formed in 1901. New York’s skyline climbed with the Flatiron Building in 1902 and the Singer Building in 1908. The Panic of 1907 revealed the volatility of finance and led to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. James’s travel chronicle The American Scene, based on 1904–1905 journeys and published in 1907, reacts to immigration, skyscrapers, and corporate power. Ford mines it to argue that James’s critique of American gigantism complements his anatomies of European gentility.
