Eric Haralson - Böcker

The New York City-born Henry James (1843-1916)-eminent novelist, amateur psychologist, inveterate bachelor-epitomizes, to many, the turn-of-the-century literary observer of social mores. His shrewd portraits of upper-class Anglo American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distilled the differences between the Old World and the New, the rise of American entrepreneurship, and an aesthetically charged European sensibility. With fictional works like Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, and The Portrait of a Lady, he displayed characters of great psychological depth, careful narrative detail, and distinctly vivid prose. With a brief biography, concise bibliographical essay, and six essays devoted to cultural context that defined him, A Historical Guide to Henry James offers an excellent primer to the author's fiction and the cultural milieu that influenced him.

The New York City-born Henry James (1843-1916)-eminent novelist, amateur psychologist, inveterate bachelor-epitomizes, to many, the turn-of-the-century literary observer of social mores. His shrewd portraits of upper-class Anglo American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distilled the differences between the Old World and the New, the rise of American entrepreneurship, and an aesthetically charged European sensibility. With fictional works like Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, and The Portrait of a Lady, he displayed characters of great psychological depth, careful narrative detail, and distinctly vivid prose. With a brief biography, concise bibliographical essay, and six essays devoted to cultural context that defined him, A Historical Guide to Henry James offers an excellent primer to the author's fiction and the cultural milieu that influenced him.

In Henry James and Queer Modernity, first published in 2003, Eric Haralson examines far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality as depicted in the writings of Henry James and three authors who were greatly influenced by him: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Haralson places emphasis on American masculinity as portrayed in fiction between 1875 and 1935, but the book also treats events in England, such as the Oscar Wilde trials, that had a major effect on American literature. He traces James's engagement with sexual politics from his first novels of the 1870s to his 'major phase' at the turn of the century. The second section of this study measures James's extraordinary impact on Cather's representation of 'queer' characters, Stein's theories of writing and authorship as a mode of resistance to modern sexual regulation, and Hemingway's very self-constitution as a manly American author.