Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture

Description

Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture addresses the interesting revival of Henry James’s works in Anglo-American film adaptations and contemporary fiction from the 1960s to the present. James’s fiction is generally considered difficult and part of high culture, more appropriate for classroom study than popular appreciation. However, this volume focuses on the adaptation of his novels into films, challenging us to understand James’s popular reputation today on both sides of the Atlantic. The book offers two explanations for his persistent influence: James’s literary ambiguity and his reliance on popular culture. “Part I: His Times” considers James’s reliance on sentimental literature and theatrical melodrama in Daisy Miller, Guy Domville, The Awkward Age, and several of his lesser known short stories. “Part II: Our Times” focuses on how James’s considerations of changing gender roles and sexual identities have influenced Hollywood representations of emancipated women in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, among others. Recent fiction by authors including James Baldwin and Leslie Marmon Silko also treat Jamesian notions of gender and sexuality while considering his part in contemporary debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both a study of James’s works and a broad range of contemporary film and fiction, Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture demonstrates the continuing relevance of Henry James to our multimedia, interdisciplinary, globalized culture. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of figures Preface Introduction: Our Henry James PART I: His Times 1. Henry James and the Form of Sentiment 2. Romantic Sentimentalism in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878) 3. From Melodrama to Soap Opera: The Awkward Age (1899) of Popular Culture 4. Henry James, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and T. S. Eliot: Some Versions of Modernism PART II: Our Times 5. Caged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in Henry James’s In the Cage and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window 6. Daisy and Frederick and Polly and Peter and Cybill and Hugh and Dorothy and Paul: Daisy Miller in Hollywood 7. For Mature Audiences: Sex and Gender in Film Adaptations of James’s Fiction. 8. What Would James Do?: Transnationalism in Recent Literary Adaptations of Henry James Epilogue: My Henry James Bibliography Index