Portrait of a Novel by Michael Gorra

Portrait of a Novel by Michael Gorra

Henry James (1843-1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel--the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer--came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James's family, the European literary circles--George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev--in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand's The Metaphysical Club and McCullough's The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

"..he [Gorra] has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted teachers should write but rarely do." -- London Review of Books
"Michael Gorra...has pulled off an astounding feat...in this impressive study...Gorra goes anywhere that strikes his fancy, and the result is splendid: a book to reread in years to come, a model for what criticism can do when happily married to biography." -- Literary Review

Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation and, for his work as a reviewer, of the Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. His books include The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War; Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of on American Masterpiece, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany; After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie; The English Novel at Mid-Century; and, as editor, The Portable Conrad and the Norton Critical Editions of The Sound and the Fury and The Portrait of a Lady.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780871406705
ISBN 10	0871406705
Titel	Portrait of a Novel
Autor	Michael Gorra
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	WW Norton & Co
Erscheinungsjahr	2013-08-09
Seitenanzahl	416
Preise	Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Award 2012
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.