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The Battle and the Books
Edward Stone
其他書名
Some Aspects of Henry James
出版Ohio University Press, 1964
主題Literary Criticism / American / General
ISBN08214000299780821400029
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=9KwEAQAAIAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋The first Part of this book is the most recent in origin, resulting as it did from an attack that appeared only yesterday on Henry James and those who read and write about him. The stature of the chief personal targets of that attack and of one of the journals that lent its pages to such abuse seemed to me to call for a reply. Although the journal in question was not receptive to my proposal that a reply be printed, I wrote one, anyway. It appears in a few (chiefly, the last few) pages of this Part. It is preceded by a review of the episodes of the battle thus violently reopened, a sampling of the evidence that others have been submitting for the greater part of the exactly one hundred years since Henry James first invited it by appearing in print. Voluminous though it. be, my compilation is obviously only a fragment of the possible whole. In the arrangement of its materials by theme, my review roughly approximates Part Two does constitute a whole by itself and has, I hope, a symmetry of its own. Its introductory chapter is a study of James's first novel in its first form; and its last, of a novel that James did not live to complete; and although (as well as because) the two novels are forty-five years and two poles apart, I hope that I have indicated at least one or more characteristics that they share, not only with each other but with the most widely-acclaimed novel of James's maturity, interpreted at some length in the first half of the central chapter of this Part. Within this symmetry I have attempted yet another. Chapter III studies novels of an American, a European, and an English novelist in the light of the fiction that they (at least in part) may have influenced James to write; whereas the two modern American writers in Chapter V are studied, in tum, as students of James himself. The materials in the middle of the book (Chapter IV) also consist of two parts, each an examination of one fairly separate aspect of James's complex art. The first explores the lengths to which he would go on occasion to make himself understood. The second is an exposition of that art from still another point of view, its pervasive fabulousness.