Download Henry James and the Father Question by Andrew Taylor PDF

By Andrew Taylor

ISBN-10: 0511018959

ISBN-13: 9780511018954

ISBN-10: 0521807220

ISBN-13: 9780521807227

The highbrow dating among Henry James and his father proved to be an influential source for the novelist. Andrew Taylor examines the character of either men's engagement with autobiographical options, problems with gender reform, and the language of faith. He argues for a studying of Henry James that's proficient via an expertise of paternal inheritance. in the course of the examine of a variety of novels and texts, he demonstrates how James Senior's discussion along with his contemporaries, reminiscent of Emerson and Whitman, anticipates James's personal theories of fiction and selfhood.

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The language is pure Jamesian – indeed one might argue that it is James’s language through virtue of his translation. ‘Sacred rites’, ‘trembling vibrations’, ‘infinite depths’, all are phrases indicative of both the delicacies and extremes of sensibility, of the presence of the unexpected and the uncanny. The period of Renan’s religious orthodoxy may be past, but it lingers as a mode of thought which cannot be entirely banished. For James, Renan offers an attractive possibility of the clerical frame of mind, ‘the groundwork’ as he calls it, ‘embroidered’ with less ascetic interests, with ‘an artistic feeling’, an ‘urbanity’ and ‘the air of being permeated by civilization’ (EWP, 637).

27 This is a liberating conclusion, for it enables James to assert that ‘even should one cease to be in love with life it would be difficult, on such terms, not to be in love with living’ (222). If our experience of living points us in the direction of an on-going and expansive consciousness, why should we assume that it will cease at the moment of physical death? This question of consciousness’s regenerative quality is expressed again in a famous letter James wrote to Henry Adams following publication of Notes of a Son and Brother.

The solution to this conundrum lies in ‘what you practically mean by “going round” the 34 Henry James and the Father Question squirrel . . ’21 For William then, questions of truth are necessarily contingent and viewpoints are multiple. But ultimately such plurality and ambiguity needs resolution if the practical applicability of pragmatism is to have any currency. ‘Make the distinction’, William counsels, and once made the situation clarifies while still acknowledging the partial framework in which that clarification has been achieved.

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