Henry James' Last Romance
Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene

A 1998 study of Henry James's classic work of cultural criticism, The American Scene.

Beverly Haviland (Author)

9780521109963, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 April 2009

300 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

"This contextualization of immigration establishes a new benchmark in interpreting James's sense of Americanness historically and expansively." Allan Hepburn, American Literature

In this 1998 study of Henry James's classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past so that he could make culture work. In this record of James's 1904–5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralysing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between 'natives' and 'aliens', between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Although James has been represented as conservative by liberal critics, it is just such simplifying oppositions that his method of interpretation works to transform. Haviland's own metonymical method follows James's interpretative practice by bringing historical and theoretical readings of these texts into conversation with each other.

Introduction: at home: the reception of Henry James
Part I. Henry James's Last Romance: The Sense of the Past: 1. The sense of the present
2. The sense of a happy ending
Part II. Civilization and its Contents: The American Scene: 3. Making signs of the past: interpretation and C. S. Peirce
4. Waste makes taste: Classicism, conspicuous consumption, and Thorstein Veblen
5. 'Psychic Mulattos': the ambiguity of race and W. E. B. Du Bois
6. The return of the alien: Ethnic identity and Jakob A. Riis
Part III. Patrimony and Matrimony: The Ivory Tower: 7. Heterosocial acts: the ambiguity of gender in the New World
8. Odd couples: Henry James Senior and Jacques Lacan
9. Irony makes love: Mrs Henry James and Washington, AC/DC.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]