Henry James’s New Approach to the Autobiographical Genre: The Growing Consciousness of A Small Boy

Yıl 1997, Sayı: 5, 59 - 68, 01.04.1997

María Antonia Alvarez

Öz

Autobiography is essential to American literature, since it is not only a genre with the most significant origins and famous classics, but also “a necessity in order to say who we are and where we have been.” It is both a part of “our daily vernacular and our earliest heritage,” which can be traced back to the Puritan diaries and the travel narratives popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Sayre 147 . An authentic autobiography must be “a weave in which self-consciousness is delicately threaded throughout interrelated experience.” It may have such varied functions as “self-explication, self-discovery, self-clarification, self-formation, selfpresentation, self-justification.” All these functions “interpenetrate easily, but all are centered upon an aware self, aware of its relation to its experiences” Weintraub 842 . This is the case of Henry James’s Autobiography, since in the form of a dramatic, distended monologue, he draws the evolution of his conscience in a timeless, spaceless world, as the best example of his stream of consciousness technique. Written in the most refined style of his latest novels, it can be considered a literary experiment in the genre by a writer consistently devoted to change. This article argues that without reading James’s memoirs, we cannot understand the rest of his work.

Kaynakça

• Abraham, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: Norton, 1971.
• Aldrich, C. Knight. “Another Twist to the Turn.” A Casebook on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Gerald Willen. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Co., 1969.
• Anderson, Quentin. The American Henry James. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957.
• Cox, James M. “The Memoirs of Henry James: Self-Interest in Autobiography.” Studies in Autobiography. Ed. James Olney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Dupee, F.W. Introduction to Henry James: Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Untried Years (1843-1873). New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1953.
• Egan, Michael. Henry James: The Ibsen Years. London: Vision Press, 1972. Getz, Thomas H. “Henry James: The Novel as Act.” The Henry James Review 4.3 (1983) : 207-18.
• Hall, Richard. “An Obscure Hurt: The Sexuality of Henry James.” The New Republic 28 April 1979 : 25-31.
• Holly, Carol. “The British Reception of Henry James’s Autobiography.” American Literature 57.4 (1985) : 570-587.
• James, Henry. Letters. Ed. Percy Lubbock, 1920. New York: Octagon Books, 1970.
• -----. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years. Ed. Frederick W. Dupee. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Krook, Dorotea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
• Lyons, Richard S. “The Social Vision of The Spoils of Poynton.” American Literature 61.1 (1989) : 59-77.
• Long, Robert Emmet. The Great Succession: Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.
• Pérez Gállego, Cándido. Relaciones Internas en Henry James: Circuitos Narrativos. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1979.
• Sayre, Robert F. “Autobiography and the Making of America.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
• Spengemann, William. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980.
• Wegelin, Christof. The Image of Europe in Henry James. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1958.
• Weintraub, Karl J. “Autobiography as Historical Consciousness.” Critical Inquiry 49: 1 (1975) : 821-848.
• Wolff, Donald. “Jamesian Historiography and The American Scene.” Henry James Review 13.2 (1992) : 154-71.