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Disavowing possession: Story, style,...

McBride, Christine A.

Disavowing possession: Story, style, and the social in Jamesian narrative (Henry James).

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Disavowing possession: Story, style, and the social in Jamesian narrative (Henry James).
Author:	McBride, Christine A.
Description:	275 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Franco Moretti.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-08, Section: A, page: 2940.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International66-08A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3187321
ISBN:	9780542295713

Disavowing possession: Story, style, and the social in Jamesian narrative (Henry James).
McBride, Christine A.

Disavowing possession: Story, style, and the social in Jamesian narrative (Henry James). - 275 p.

Adviser: Franco Moretti.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2005.

"Disavowing Possession" challenges the idea that the novel's "inward" turn---so often associated with Henry James's late phase---entails an abandonment of social representation for "pure" self-reflexivity. I argue, to the contrary, that James's late fiction captures the logic of bourgeois acquisitiveness as it impinges upon the novel itself. This study contends that James's innovations in perspective and the late style present a response to the novel's contradictory status at the close of the nineteenth century: commodity and objet d'art, complicit with and wary of a culture given over to consumption.

ISBN: 9780542295713Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

Disavowing possession: Story, style, and the social in Jamesian narrative (Henry James).
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245 1 0 $a Disavowing possession: Story, style, and the social in Jamesian narrative (Henry James).
300 $a 275 p.
500 $a Adviser: Franco Moretti.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-08, Section: A, page: 2940.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2005.
520 # $a "Disavowing Possession" challenges the idea that the novel's "inward" turn---so often associated with Henry James's late phase---entails an abandonment of social representation for "pure" self-reflexivity. I argue, to the contrary, that James's late fiction captures the logic of bourgeois acquisitiveness as it impinges upon the novel itself. This study contends that James's innovations in perspective and the late style present a response to the novel's contradictory status at the close of the nineteenth century: commodity and objet d'art, complicit with and wary of a culture given over to consumption.
520 # $a Chapter One examines James's critique of possessive individualism in "The Aspern Papers," "The Figure in the Carpet," and "The Spoils of Poynton." In these texts, James uses the frustrated pursuit of aesthetic objects to indict a fashionable fetishism of the late-Victorian bourgeoisie: its cult of prestigious possessions as a displaced, sublimated form of social climbing. Chapter Two analyzes James's struggle both to repudiate and to redeem the realist novel's complicity in endorsing the bourgeois worldview: through a reading of "Spoils," I show how this axiological ambivalence generates a formal dissonance between plot, narration, and style. In the course of the discussion I advance a theoretical model for "disavowing" texts, which are structured (as "Spoils" is) by a conflict between two competing systems of value. Chapter Three describes new forms of narrative ambivalence typical of James's impressionist novels---"What Maisie Knew," "The Ambassadors," "The Wings of the Dove." These novels stage a renunciation of their mercenary plot line via the consciousness of James's "reflector" (Maisie Farange, Lambert Strether, Merton Densher); they subsequently discredit that internalized perspective, however, by drawing out in the course of action the sexual and commercial relations that James's reflector insistently disclaims. Finally, Chapter Four interprets James's highly mediated late style as a strategy which reinforces the effect of his overall narrative structure in distancing novelistic reading from the false immediacy of commodity consumption. With the late style, I argue, James fulfills the rhetorical promise of "The Art of Fiction," defining a niche for the literary novel within, yet somehow outside, an ever-widening market for narrative forms.
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773 0 # $g 66-08A. $t Dissertation Abstracts International
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790 1 0 $a Moretti, Franco, $e advisor
791 $a Ph.D.
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