Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation

Sara Blair author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:12th Feb '09

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Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation cover

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

This 1996 book argues that Henry James's work exemplifies the complex role literature plays in the formation of broadly racial, national and cultural identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blair delineates the complexity of his engagement with emergent cultural rituals through which American values are being forged.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.

"There is much to praise in Blair's book: her mastery of the relevant scholarship, her illuminating, often brilliant, analyses of individual texts, her wide-ranging insight into the events, places, institutions, and ideas that engaged James's mind to become the experience he transformed into art." Elsa Nettels, The Henry James Review
"This book is an important contribution to the continuing debates about James's place in literature and about the place of high art in the development of any culture at all." Choice
"...Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation manifests many of the strengths ofmodern-day criticism...." Jim Barloon, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920
"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

ISBN: 9780521107600

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 16mm

Weight: 400g

272 pages