Using insights from feminist studies, men's studies, and gay and queer studies, Leland Person examines Henry James's subversion of male identity and the challenges he poses to conventional constructs of heterosexual masculinity. Sexual and gender categories proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Person argues that James exploited the taxonomic confusion of the times to experiment with alternative sexual and gender identities. In contrast to scholars who have tried to give a single label to James's sexuality, Person argues that establishing James's gender and sexual identity is less important than examining the novelist's shaping of male characters and his richly metaphorical language as an experiment in gender and sexual theorizing. Just as an author's creations can be animated by his or her own sexuality, Person contends, James's sexuality may be most usefully understood as something primarily aesthetic and textual. As Person shows in chapters devoted to some of this author's best-known novels—Roderick Hudson, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl—James conducts a series of experiments in gender/sexual construction and deconstruction. He delights in positioning his male characters so that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple. Ultimately, he keeps male identity in suspense by pluralizing male subjectivity.

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the gendered power relations in James’s novels. Reading James’s narrative form through the lens of relational sociology, specifically Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic domination, reconciles some of the most fiercely disputed positions in James studies of the past decades. The close readings focus on three novels, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, providing a systematic relational analysis into the specifically Jamesian method of narrating the socio-psychological, embodied responses to masculine power and oppression. James persistently narrates his characters as social agents whose perception, affects, and bodily practices are products of the social structures that they in turn continue to shape and reproduce. The chapters trace a development throughout James’s career that reflects a growing sensitivity for the concealment and attendant misrecognition of gendered domination.

"This is the first collection to bring together previously unpublished essays exploring James's depictions of gender and his use of sexual imagery that is balanced, objective, and critically diverse. Nine articles examine James's fiction, films made from his works, his own literary criticism, letters, and travel writing. These essays represent a range of theoretical perspectives - cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, queer theory, Lacanian and deconstructive psychoanalytic studies, and historicism." "This volume will be a valuable resource for readers in the fields of James, American literature, the novel, and gender studies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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.

This book offers the first full-length study of Henry James's relationship with, and literary treatment of, New York. It shows how the city, whether observed or reimagined, always remained an essential component of James's identity. New York compelled James to confront both his status as an American-born male artist and his age's prevailing notions of gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, and success. Tracing James's attachment to the city and how it evolved during his lifetime, this book examines a wide range of James's works, from his short stories and novels to his non-fiction writing.

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), University of Stuttgart (Institute for American Studies), language: English, abstract: Henry James was 35 years old in 1878 when he wrote "Daisy Miller". He was considered a celebrity in his home country America and also in England, which was later to become his second home. Not only was he successful in writing his novel, he also changed American literature with his masterpiece. Generations of literary critics have been dealing with "Daisy Miller" in terms of the creation of a new type of American female.1 In my paper I want to approach the novel a little differently by taking a closer look at the male protagonist Frederick Winterbourne. I would also like to take a closer look at the narrative perspective and the way Winterbourne is represented by it. Furthermore I am interested in the gender relationship between Daisy and Winterbourne and their attempts to find a way to get together. The problems arising from this, concerning Winterbourne, will lead me to the last topic, the crisis in American masculinity, the images of masculinity reflected in the novel and a way of creating a new identity of American men. A main problem is procrastination that keeps people from doing the right thing and developing as a person. Another thing I want to take a look at is the mystery Daisy as an American woman is for Winterbourne and how he deals with his insecurity. In fighting it he makes attempts to create his masculinity. James also intended to make his protagonists allegories of certain features in the American mentality and shows problems of American society in the 19th century. James takes an exemplary relationship by which he tries to depict the very tricky situation of America itself and gender-relation in America in those days. The young expatriate Winterbourne and his problems with his countrywoman Daisy Miller mirror the problematic situation of the nation. The way James employs shifts in his narration shows the reader how strange the situation is and somehow also comical. Winterbourne whose main interest is the innocence of Daisy is in bigger terms looking for America′s innocence that seemed to be lost after the end of the Civil War.

Rowe uses recent work on the oppressive treatment of gays, women and children in his analysis of Henry James, arguing that James mounts a critique of bourgeois values and lack of historical consciousness.