-
NO ONE'S MASTER
- Author(s):
- Lucy Biederman
- Editor(s):
- Kreg Abshire (see profile)
- Date:
- 2018
- Subject(s):
- Culture--Study and teaching, United States, American literature, Nineteenth century, Twentieth century, Twenty-first century, James, Henry, 1843-1916
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- style, American cultural studies, American literature after 1800, Henry James
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6FN10R8T
- Abstract:
- Henry James has appeared as a fictional character or abiding spiritual presence in more than a dozen novels and short stories since the millennium, including Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author, which competed for critical and popular attention in 2004, which Lodge later called “The Year of Henry James.” Both novels imagine James’s consciousness in his final years. In Cynthia Ozick’s “Dictation” (2008), meanwhile, James plays second fiddle to his feisty typist, Theodora Bosanquet. In Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Master at St. Bartholomew Hospital, 1914-1916” (2008), James surprises even himself by serving as a wartime hospital volunteer. Even more recent, John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond (2017) jams James’s Isabel Archer, the “vivid individual” on which James built The Portrait of a Lady, back into “the house of fiction” (James, “Preface” 47, 46). But I am concerned here with the character of James himself, not Isabel. Given James’s many valences in so many recent works of fiction, it feels appropriate to repurpose the question that Captain Yule asks the butler, Chivers, in James’s 1907 play The High Bid— I mean to whom do you beautifully belong? (567)
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial
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