Henry James and the imagination of pleasure / / Tessa Hadley

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910970818003321
• Autore: Hadley Tessa
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2002
• ISBN: 1-107-12534-0; 0-521-11985-5; 0-511-48511-5; 0-511-04520-4; 0-511-15674-X; 1-280-15960-X; 0-511-12028-1; 0-511-30420-X
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (viii, 205 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Disciplina: 813/.4
• Soggetti: Imagination in literature; Pleasure in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-203) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 'Just you wait!': reflections on the last chapters of The Portrait of a Lady -- As charming as a charming story': governesses in What Maisie Knew and 'The Turn of the Screw' -- 'The sacred terror': The Awkward Age and James's men of the world -- Blushing in the dark: language and sex in The Ambassadors -- Poor girls with their rent to pay: class in 'In the Cage'and The Wings of the Dove -- 'A house of quiet': privileges and pleasures in The Golden Bowl -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
• Sommario/riassunto: Tessa Hadley examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralizing frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. Hadley argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping to leave behind a way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the 1890s as explorations of how disabling and distorting ideals of ; women's goodness and purity were learned and perpetuated within English and American cultural processes. These explorations, Hadley argues, liberate James to write the great heterosexual love affairs of the late novels, with their emphasis on the power of pleasure and play: themes which are central to James's ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure class society.