"Three years spent in France, during the 'Second Empire' of Napoleon III, gave Henry James an early mastery of the French language and its literature. When he settled in Europe, as an adult, it was not in Britain but, briefly yet crucially, in Paris. This study identifies the 'missing link' in the history of James's literary engagement with France, between Balzac, revered throughout his career, and later French writers. It was Second Empire writers who spurred James's own contribution to the novel. While realism courted official displeasure, culminating in the prosecution of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and closure of the radical Revue de Paris which serialized it, the conservative Revue des Deux Mondes (to which James subscribed) enjoyed imperial approval. James remained indebted to the authors published in its pages - Edmond About, Victor Cherbuliez, and Octave Feuillet - to his close friend Paul Bourget, and to the era's greatest playwright, Alexandre Dumas fils."

"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

A survey of 25 major European novelists from Cervantes to Kundera, highlighting their contributions to the genre.

This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international ‘English’ in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices. It highlights how, in the wake of American independence, the affection bestowed on authors who became international objects of celebration and commemoration was a major force in the invention of transnational ‘English’ literature, the popular canon defined by shared language and tradition. While love as such is difficult to quantify and recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also in other media: in monuments, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, this collection brings into view a wide range of nineteenth-century expressions of love for literature and its creators.

Henry James's reputation as The Master is so familiar that it's hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year--1875 to 1876--when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James's writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist's Paris year--and its momentous artistic and personal consequences. James's Paris story is one of enchantment and disenchantment. He initially loved Paris, he succeeded in meeting all the writers he admired (Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Daudet), and he witnessed the latest development in French painting, Impressionism. But James largely found the writers disappointing, and he completely misunderstood the paintings he saw. He also seems to have fallen in and out of love in a more ordinary sense--with a young Russian aesthete, Paul Zhukovsky. Disillusioned, James soon retreated to England--for good. But James would eventually be changed forever by his memories of Paris.

Explores the diverse forces that shaped developments in literature in the 1880s, an often overlooked literary decade.

Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

This meticulously edited collection includes Henry James' complete novels and short stories, as well as critical essays, plays, travel sketches and reports of the great author. The life of Henry James is revealed in different biographies, and in his three autobiographical books. Content: Novels: Watch and Ward Roderick Hudson The American The Europeans Confidence Washington Square The Portrait of a Lady The Bostonians The Princess Casamassima The Reverberator The Tragic Muse The Other House The Spoils of Poynton What Maisie Knew The Awkward Age The Sacred Fount The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl The Outcry The Ivory Tower The Sense of the Past Short Stories A Passionate Pilgrim The Last of the Valerii Eugene Pickering The Madonna of the Future The Romance of Certain Old Clothes Madame de Mauves Tales of Three Cities The Impressions of a Cousin Lady Barberina A New England Winter Stories Revived The Author of 'Beltraffio' Pandora The Path of Duty A Light Man A Day of Days Georgina's Reasons A Landscape-Painter Théodolinde (Rose-Agathe) Poor Richard Master Eustace A Most Extraordinary Case A London Life The Patagonia The Liar Mrs. Temperly The Real Thing Sir Dominick Ferrand Nona Vincent The Chaperon Greville Fane The Siege of London An International Episode The Pension Beaurepas A Bundle of Letters The Point of View Terminations Embarrassments The Two Magics The Soft Side The Finer Grain Other Stories Plays: Daisy Miller Pyramus and Thisbe Still Waters A Change of Heart The Album Disengaged Tenants The Reprobate Guy Domville The Outcry The High Bid Summersoft Travel Writings: A Little Tour in France English Hours Italian Hours The American Scene Transatlantic Sketches Portraits of Places Literary Essays: Notes on Novelists Views and Reviews Within the Rim and Other Essays French Poets and Novelists Partial Portraits Essays in London and Elsewhere Notes and Reviews Picture and Text Biographies: Hawthorne William Wetmore Story and His Friends Rupert Brooke Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others Notes of a Son and Brother The Middle Years

Now back in print, this heartbreaking novel by Romain Gary has inspired two movies, including the Netflix feature The Life Ahead Momo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores’ children at Madame Rosa’s boarding house in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, slightly macabre love story between Momo and Madame Rosa has a supporting cast of transvestites, pimps, and witch doctors from Paris’s immigrant slum, Belleville. Profoundly moving, The Life Before Us won France’s premier literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.