Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation

An examination of Henry James's work in the context of popular culture, first published in 1996.

Sara Blair (Author)

9780521497503, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 1996

272 pages, 12 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

"This excellent study of Henry James marks an important turn in the scholarship of American literature, one that provokes reflection on why it has taken so long to read James through the precarious constitution of racial and national identities. ...Blair candidly describes how competing critical imperatives have enriched her approach.... The reader cannot help but notice how gracefully her writing flows...." The New England Quarterly

This 1996 book describes a new Henry James who, rather than being paraded as a beacon of high culture, actually expresses a nuanced understanding of, and engagement with, popular culture. Arguing against recent trends in critical studies which locate racial resistance in popular culture, Sara Blair uncovers this resistance within literature and high modernism. She analyses a variety of texts from early travel writing to The Princess Casamassima, The American Scene and The Tragic Muse, always setting the scene through descriptions of key events of the time such as Jack the Ripper's murders. Blair makes a powerful case for reading James with a sense of sustained contradiction and her project absorbingly argues for the historical and ongoing importance of literary texts and discourses to the study of culture and cultural value.

Introduction: making a difference: Henry James, literary culture, and racial theater
1. First impressions: 'Questions of Ethnography' and the art of travel
2. 'Preparation for culture': Anthony Trollope, the American Century, and the fiction of freedom
3. 'Trying to be Natural': authorship and the power of type in The Princess Casamassima
4. James, Jack the Ripper, and the cosmopolitan Jew: staging authorship in The Tragic Muse
5. Documenting the alien: racial theater in The American Scene.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]