This book explores Henry James's negotiations with nineteenth-century ideas about gender, sexuality, class, and literary style through the responses of three women who have never before been substantively examined in light of their relationships to his work. Writing in different times and places, Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, and Marguerite Duras nevertheless share complex navigations of womanhood and authorship, as well as a history of feminist scholarly responses to their work. Kathryn Wichelns draws upon James' correspondence with Fields, as well as Dickinson's and Duras's revisions of his fiction, to offer a new understanding of gender-transgressive elements of his project. By contextualizing his writing within a diverse set of feminist perspectives, each grounded in a specific time and place, as well as nineteenth-century views of queer male sexuality, Wichelns demonstrates the centrality of Henry James's ambivalent identifications with women tohis work.

Highlights the influence, interaction, and correspondence between James and his work and women writers Contributes to a contemporary feminist analysis of Henry James's work Emphasizes transatlantic scholarship across historical periods

Autorentext

Kathryn Wichelns is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.

Klappentext

Inhalt

1 Introduction: On James, Mastery and Transgresion.- 2 "Those Who Know: Henry James and Annie Adams Fields.- 3 Emily Dickinson's Henry James.- 4 Henry James, French Feminist: Marguerite Duras's La Bête dans la jungle.- 5 Gender, Colonialism, and Italian Difference: Duras and The Aspern Papers.- 6 Conclusion: Towards a Queer Feminist James.