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person1864-1916

Henry James

Disciplines:
literature
film criticism/criticism
fiction/novel

Summary

Henry James was an American-British novelist whose late style rendered consciousness itself as the subject of fiction.

Core Contribution

James's technique of rendering experience through a limited but deeply attentive consciousness provides the literary analogy for Nolan's subjective-camera techniques.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • The central consciousness (James restricts everything to what one character can perceive and infer -- the reader experiences the world as this character experiences it, nothing more)
  • Late style difficulty (James's final three novels are deliberately obscure -- a sentence can suspend a judgment for an entire paragraph while performing the act of judging)

Notable Works & Achievements

The Portrait of a Lady

The Turn of the Screw

What Maisie Knew

The Ambassadors

Historical Influences

Honore de BalzacIvan Turgenev

Intellectual Lineage

American realism Psychological novel tradition

Contemporaries & Peers

Edith Wharton Joseph Conrad

Minds Influenced

Virginia Woolf James Joyce Christopher Nolan

Intellectual Posterity

Stream of consciousness novelThe modern psychological novel

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