Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence

Download or read book Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence written by J. Bradley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-10-27 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry James remained throughout his life focused on his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on younger boys and men, and John R. Bradley illustrates how it is in the context of such narcissism that James consistently dealt with male desire in his fiction. He also traces a more subtle but related trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist gay discourse, which in turn is shown to have been paralleled by a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical book, which covers the whole of James's career, will quickly be recognized as a defining text in this emerging field of James studies.