Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence

  • Book
  • © 2000

Overview

Authors:
  1. John R. Bradley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Critical Hostility

    • John R. Bradley
    Pages 1-11

  3. Defining James’s Homosexuality

    • John R. Bradley
    Pages 13-30

  4. Whitman, Pater and the Importance of Being Manly in James’s Early Fiction

    • John R. Bradley
    Pages 31-74

  5. John Addington Symonds and ‘The Author of Beltraffio’

    • John R. Bradley
    Pages 75-89

  6. Public Scandals, Private Dilemmas

    • John R. Bradley
    Pages 91-124

  7. The Uses of Obscurity

    • John R. Bradley
    Pages 125-140

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 141-162
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

Henry James remained throughout his life focused on his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on younger boys and men, and John R. Bradley illustrates how it is in the context of such narcissism that James consistently dealt with male desire in his fiction. He also traces a more subtle but related trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist gay discourse, which in turn is shown to have been paralleled by a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical book, which covers the whole of James's career, will quickly be recognized as a defining text in this emerging field of James studies.

Reviews

`Henry James's Permanent Adolescence is an important addition to the critical reconsideration of Henry James's fictional representations of gender and sexuality. John R. Bradley's notion of 'permanent adolescence' helps us understand James's relationship to his art in the wider context of late-Victorian aestheticism and Decadence, with a particular focus on Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde. Carefully interpreting representative works from each major period is James's career, Bradley offers us a new perspective on how James's art developed in conjunction with his changing views on sexuality'. - Professor John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine

'Bradley writes with admirable lucidity and a companionable briskness...his book...(is) a judicious and, at times, illuminating study of James as a 'gay' artist.' - James Friel, Liverpool John Moores University

'Henry James's Permanent Adolescence is a valuable and well-written contribution to the on-going debate on James's fiction.' - English Language Teaching

About the author

JOHN R. BRADLEY was educated at University College London, Dartmouth College and Exeter College, Oxford. He was editor of the London Quarterly (1994-97) and has contributed essays and reviews to many newspapers and journals in Britain and the United States. He has edited two collections of essays: Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (1999) and Henry James on the Stage and Screen (2000).

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation