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Seminar: Topics in Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture

01-Henry James in Context

This seminar will explore the world and writing of one of the most important American (and British) authors of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, paying particular attention to the extended network of his relations with other writers and artists of the time. James’s work is often challenging. Students should be ready to take on not only a broad range of his essays and stories, but also at least four of his long novels, The Portrait of A Lady, The Bostonians, What Maisie Knew, and The Wings of the Dove. In addition, we will be looking at much of the visual and philosophical culture of the period and reading James’s criticism of it; and we will be reading selections from other authors of importance to James, such as Honoré de Balzac, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and William Dean Howells. This class will require four or five response papers of varying length, as well as an extended essay responding to some aspect of contemporary James criticism.