Henry James Goes to War

Within the past decades, Henry James has been seen going to the movies and to Paris, both far more likely destinations for him than battlefields of the modern world. Sending him off to war seems to be a preposterous idea, but the exaggeration inscribed in the title of the present volume is meant to stress the historicity of wars and battles underlying James's life and work, quite apart from conflict on which literature thrives at all times. The book consists of five parts devoted to various forms and aspects of conflict. It deals with both literal and metaphorical battles of which the author was aware or in which he was involved. Apart from addressing James's attitude to two major conflicts, the Civil War and World War One, the articles range from critical discussions of James's biography, criticism, and fiction, to studies of the intertextual connections between his oeuvre and works of both past and present authors.

Autorentext

Miroslawa Buchholtz is Professor of English and Director of the English Department at Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland), where she teaches American and Canadian literature, film adaptations of literature and biography, life writing and postcolonial studies. She has published books and articles on Henry James.
Dorota Guttfeld is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland), where she teaches translation studies and science fiction literature.
Grzegorz Koneczniak is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland). His research interests include postcolonial literatures, postcolonial theatre, Anglo-Irish literature, literary theory, and comparative studies.

Inhalt

Contents: Miroslawa Buchholtz: Introduction: Henry James in Times Past and Present - Annick Duperray: Conflicting Identities: The Two Faces of Henry James - Greg W. Zacharias: Henry James's Struggle with Writing and Friends - Joseph Kuhn: «An Obscure Hurt»: Henry James's Civil War and the Literary Uses of the Confederacy - Keiko Beppu: James Comes to Terms with the Civil War and the South: A Round of His Visits to the South in 1904-1905 - Ágnes Zsófia Kovács: Henry James's Sense of the American Civil War in The American Scene - Jacek Gutorow: Within the Rim: Henry James, War and Insularity - Katie Sommer: Henry James and Soldiers during World War I: Four Letters - Alicja Piechucka: «Our Murdered Civilization»: Echoes of the Great War in Henry James's Correspondence and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land - Beata Williamson: Henry James and Julian Hawthorne, or, on the Importance of Name - Katarzyna Wieckowska: Haunted by James: Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and the Politics of the Secret - Robert Kusek: Colm Tóibín: «Wrestling» with the Master - Karolina Krasuska: Henry James, Transatlantic Jewishness, and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies - Grzegorz Koneczniak: Postcolonising Henry James: Confrontations - Miroslawa Buchholtz: Henry James of the Empire - Urszula Golebiowska: Acquisitive Perception and Inner Conflict in Henry James's Fiction - Agnes Pokol-Hayhurst: Jamesian Battles between Desire and Moral Integrity - Capital Dilemmas - Elaine Hudson: The Spoils of Henry James: Between the Public and the Private - Mary C. Boyington: Ghostly Confrontations and Inner Conflict: An Autobiographical Reading of «Owen Wingrave» - Sylwia Wojciechowska: Amoenus versus Horridus. The Turn of the Screw and the (Counter)Pastoral - Waldemar Skrzypczak: Setting the Scene in Selected Tales by Henry James.