Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece - Rilegato

Gorra, Michael

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0871404087 ISBN 13: 9780871404084

Casa editrice: Liveright Pub Corp, 2012

Riassunto

Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

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Recensione:

"Michael Gorra has...created a book that is an adventure from beginning to end.... There are places... where Gorra gets so close to the making of Portrait of a Lady, he actually crosses over from literary history into the interior of James's consciousness. The interior world that Gorra imagines, and that we come to inhabit, is so plausible, so true to life, that his Portrait of a Novel becomes a novel--a masterpiece of critical imagination." ----Alice Kaplan

"It is a tribute to his [Gorra's] book that he makes us feel the life, of the book and its characters and its author, so deeply. He earns the right to end with James's wonderful words, "There really is too much to say." ----Hermione Lee, The Guardian

"...nobody to my knowledge has written more perceptively about The Portrait of a Lady. Gorra's reading of the novel is consistently revealing...Portrait of a Novel is not only instructive and a pleasure to read, but (as Gorra doubtless intended) it also sends us back to James with a deeper appreciation for his literary technique..." -- --The Sunday Times

"...he [Gorra] has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted teachers should write but rarely do." ----The London Review of Books

"...nobody to my knowledge has written more perceptively about The Portrait of a Lady. Gorra's reading of the novel is consistently revealing...Portrait of a Novel is not only instructive and a pleasure to read, but (as Gorra doubtless intended) it also sends us back to James with a deeper appreciation for his literary technique..." ----The Sunday Times

L'autore:

Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College and is the author of, among other works, After Empire, The Bells in Their Silence. He edited the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Liveright Pub Corp
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0871404087
• ISBN 13: 9780871404084
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 385