The French Side of Henry James

There is a surprising amount of France and French in the works of Henry James and this book is the first to explore these matters in depth and detail. It concentrates on the major monuments The American, The Princess Casamassima, and The Ambassadors, while it also surveys fictional works short and long usually thought of as "Italian ( The Portrait of a Lady ) or "English" (What Maisie Knew). The critical method employed is close attention to textual detail, especially of a bilingual or multilingual nature, as well as to extratextual referents, e.g., the street-plan of Paris as fictively exploited by and in the Jamesian text. Fussell attempts to recover from guide-books and the like what may be known about the original Tourist Readers in their traveling or expatriated romanticisms. He emphasizes such categories as alienation and disjunction, and shows how this disjunction explodes the notion of "organic unity" in the work of representational art, "narrative" being so often apart from, or even at odds with, "setting". The French Side of Henry James is essential reading for anyone interested in James, modern fiction, and critical theory -indeed, for all dwellers in the global village desiring to know more about how literature transcends national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.