UID:
almahu_9949703593802882
Format:
1 online resource.
ISBN:
9789004485594
,
9789042012806
Series Statement:
Brill Book Archive Part 1, ISBN: 9789004472495 10
Content:
Henry James and the "Aliens" intervenes substantially in current debates in James studies, most notably in the key areas of cultural studies, ethnic studies and queer studies. Focusing throughout on questions of identity, and most prominently on how the latter is given shape in the very form of the late style, the book finds that James's response to the ethnic other can be grasped neither as an attempt to police, supervise and master the other, nor as a politics of non-identical surrender to that other. Instead, there is a continuum of identity-akin to the "criminal continuity" that James registers throughout the American scene-in which self and other, native and alien, subject and object adopt alternate roles of control and submission. Both are at times in possession of the American scene and possessed by that scene. Jamesian sexual identity, too, proves to be constantly reconstituted in transitive processes of signification that make it impossible to fix the "I" or the "other" within a fixed framework-be that framework a heterosexual or a homosexual one. The eroticism that strikingly informs the late James can therefore only be captured, if at all, under the rubric of the "queer.".
Note:
Acknowledgments -- Introduction: What Then Is the American Scene? -- One: Possessing the American Scene: Race and Vulgarity, Seduction and Judgment -- Two: Consuming, Performing and Judging the American Scene -- Three: Enjoying the American Scene: The Overpowering "Presence" of Sites, Buildings and "Aliens" -- Four: Queering the American Scene: James's Obliquely Possessive Plottings of Desire -- Index.
Additional Edition:
Print version: Henry James and the "Aliens" : In Possession of the American Scene. Leiden ; Boston : BRILL, 2002 ISBN 9789042012806
Language:
English
