The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity
Online ISBN:
9780197726631
Print ISBN:
9780195066067
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book
The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity
Published online:
31 October 2023
Published in print:
7 November 1991
Online ISBN:
9780197726631
Print ISBN:
9780195066067
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Cite
Posnock, Ross, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York, NY , 1991; online edn, Oxford Academic, 31 Oct. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195066067.001.0001, accessed 14 May 2025.
Abstract
This study integrates literary and biographical criticism with social and cultural theory to make a major advance in our understanding of the life of two of America's most luminous intellectual figures. The central premise is that to contextualize the novelist inevitably involves assessing his relationship with his elder brother, William, and the study reveals how the psychological and cultural components of the Henry/William relation reciprocally interact. Posnock provides a new way to think about the relation of the brothers to each other and to their larger cultural moment: the challenge and trauma of early twentieth-century modernity.
Subject
Literature
Collection:
Oxford Scholarship Online
Contents
-
Front Matter
- 1 Introduction: Master and Worm; Anarchist and Idiot
-
I The Trial of Curiosity
Ross Posnock -
II The Challenge of Modernity
Ross Posnock- 6 “Adventures of the Critical Spirit”: Rereading The American Scene
- 7 “At the Active Pitch”: Mimetic Selfhood in James’s Autobiography
- 8 Lifting the Yoke of the Genteel: Henry James, George Santayana, and Howard Sturgis
- 9 Going to Smash: Violence in The Ambassadors
- 10 “The Amazing Hotel-World”: The American Scene of 1904
- Coda: The Politics of Nonidentity
-
End Matter
© Oxford University Press 1991
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