A form foredoomed to looseness
Subtitle: Henry James's preoccupation with the gender of fiction
By: Cecile Mazzucco-Than.
Series: The modernist revolution in world literature ;; v. 3
Publisher: P. Lang
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 241
Subjects: James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Aesthetics.; Fiction -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.; Sex role in literature.; Literary form.; Fiction.
Description: "This book examines critical prose written by Henry James and a representative group of American and British novelists and critics of his era in order to reveal a subtextual debate about the gender of fiction. A close examination of the adjectives and metaphors used to describe fiction uncovers a persistent pattern linked to the socio-cultural valuation of women's work versus men's.

James's prose criticism reveals the strongest pattern, but a similar pattern is also discernable in criticism by well-known authors such as W. D. Howells and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as the anonymous and now obscure critics writing in the periodicals of James's day.

Studying the gendered accounts of the art of fiction can help redesign our idea of the modern, especially the modern novel, as a creative misreading based on changes in the roles of men and women and ideas of gender that existed in society and culture and reverberated in literature."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-238) and index.
Table of contents: title: "He came in multiple": the master looks in the mirror; title: The 'Margaret-ghost' meets the dynamo and the virgin: the subject-in-process and gender; title: Weaving and tapping: the subject-in-process and James's metaphors for the gender of fiction; title: "Is it a boy or a girl?" - Ives, Howells and Wharton; title: "If manly be an adjective" - Lee, Stevenson, Conrad, and Wells; title: (Un)ravelling the endless sentence: James as the Lady of Shalott; title: The masculine equivalent of feminine realism or the feminine equivalent of masculine realism.