Esta dissertação aborda a questão da “inocência americana” em duas obras do escritor norte-americano Henry James, empregando conceitos da Literatura Comparada como base para a análise dos textos escolhidos: The American e Daisy Miller: A Study. Portanto, os conceitos de intertextualidade, influência e alteridade são fundamentais para o estabelecimento das confluências e divergências entre as duas obras. Este trabalho também apresenta uma análise, com base na teoria comparatista da interdisciplinaridade, entre a obra literária Daisy Miller: A Study e o filme Daisy Miller, dirigido por Peter Bogdanovich. O tema recorrente nas obras analisadas, o da “inocência americana”, foi abordado por Henry James em grande parte de sua produção literária, sendo um reflexo de sua própria experiência como o “outro”, bem como de suas observações sobre seus compatriotas, quando confrontados com os valores e tradições vigentes na Europa, no século XIX. James alcançou seu merecido lugar no cânone literário ocidental, graças ao seu estilo incomparável, o qual foi aperfeiçoando durante toda sua carreira e até hoje é parâmetro para escritores contemporâneos. / This thesis approaches the “American innocence” issue in two works of the North- American writer Henry James by using some concepts of Comparative Literature as base to the analysis of the chosen texts: The American and Daisy Miller: A Study. Therefore, the concepts of intertextuality, influence and alterity are vital to establish the confluences and divergences between the analyzed works. This work also presents an analysis, based on the interdisciplinary theory, between the literary work Daisy Miller: A Study and the film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, Daisy Miller. The recurrent theme in the analyzed works, the American innocence, was approached by Henry James in most part of his literary production, being a reflex of his own experience as the “other”, and his observations on his countrymen, when confronted with the values and traditions in vigor in the nineteenth-century Europe. Henry James has achieved his place on the Western literary canon, due to his incomparable writing style, which he had improved through his career and still today is a reference to contemporary writers.

Esta dissertação aborda a questão da “inocência americana” em duas obras do escritor norte-americano Henry James, empregando conceitos da Literatura Comparada como base para a análise dos textos escolhidos: The American e Daisy Miller: A Study. Portanto, os conceitos de intertextualidade, influência e alteridade são fundamentais para o estabelecimento das confluências e divergências entre as duas obras. Este trabalho também apresenta uma análise, com base na teoria comparatista da interdisciplinaridade, entre a obra literária Daisy Miller: A Study e o filme Daisy Miller, dirigido por Peter Bogdanovich. O tema recorrente nas obras analisadas, o da “inocência americana”, foi abordado por Henry James em grande parte de sua produção literária, sendo um reflexo de sua própria experiência como o “outro”, bem como de suas observações sobre seus compatriotas, quando confrontados com os valores e tradições vigentes na Europa, no século XIX. James alcançou seu merecido lugar no cânone literário ocidental, graças ao seu estilo incomparável, o qual foi aperfeiçoando durante toda sua carreira e até hoje é parâmetro para escritores contemporâneos. / This thesis approaches the “American innocence” issue in two works of the North- American writer Henry James by using some concepts of Comparative Literature as base to the analysis of the chosen texts: The American and Daisy Miller: A Study. Therefore, the concepts of intertextuality, influence and alterity are vital to establish the confluences and divergences between the analyzed works. This work also presents an analysis, based on the interdisciplinary theory, between the literary work Daisy Miller: A Study and the film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, Daisy Miller. The recurrent theme in the analyzed works, the American innocence, was approached by Henry James in most part of his literary production, being a reflex of his own experience as the “other”, and his observations on his countrymen, when confronted with the values and traditions in vigor in the nineteenth-century Europe. Henry James has achieved his place on the Western literary canon, due to his incomparable writing style, which he had improved through his career and still today is a reference to contemporary writers.

Esta dissertação aborda a questão da “inocência americana” em duas obras do escritor norte-americano Henry James, empregando conceitos da Literatura Comparada como base para a análise dos textos escolhidos: The American e Daisy Miller: A Study. Portanto, os conceitos de intertextualidade, influência e alteridade são fundamentais para o estabelecimento das confluências e divergências entre as duas obras. Este trabalho também apresenta uma análise, com base na teoria comparatista da interdisciplinaridade, entre a obra literária Daisy Miller: A Study e o filme Daisy Miller, dirigido por Peter Bogdanovich. O tema recorrente nas obras analisadas, o da “inocência americana”, foi abordado por Henry James em grande parte de sua produção literária, sendo um reflexo de sua própria experiência como o “outro”, bem como de suas observações sobre seus compatriotas, quando confrontados com os valores e tradições vigentes na Europa, no século XIX. James alcançou seu merecido lugar no cânone literário ocidental, graças ao seu estilo incomparável, o qual foi aperfeiçoando durante toda sua carreira e até hoje é parâmetro para escritores contemporâneos. / This thesis approaches the “American innocence” issue in two works of the North- American writer Henry James by using some concepts of Comparative Literature as base to the analysis of the chosen texts: The American and Daisy Miller: A Study. Therefore, the concepts of intertextuality, influence and alterity are vital to establish the confluences and divergences between the analyzed works. This work also presents an analysis, based on the interdisciplinary theory, between the literary work Daisy Miller: A Study and the film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, Daisy Miller. The recurrent theme in the analyzed works, the American innocence, was approached by Henry James in most part of his literary production, being a reflex of his own experience as the “other”, and his observations on his countrymen, when confronted with the values and traditions in vigor in the nineteenth-century Europe. Henry James has achieved his place on the Western literary canon, due to his incomparable writing style, which he had improved through his career and still today is a reference to contemporary writers.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1963 N49

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines the late novels of Henry James in the light of a distinction between "resolved" and "unresolved" ironies. The first chapter aims to clarify this distinction, arguing that in "traditional" ii'onie works the dominant irony is characteristically "resolved": that is, such works are structured upon the gradual enlightenment of the protagonist, to issue in the extinction of irony as such a protagonist achieves equality of insight with the reader. Such resolution, it is argued, is dependent on the author's access to and acceptance of a stable system of values. Conversely, where such stable communal values seem to the writer to be inconsistent with the unstable reality he perceives, the dominant irony of the work, in not being based upon a clearly defined or implied norm, is likely to remain "unresolved". The second chapter approaches the nineteenth-century novel as the product of a society generally perceived to be based on firmly established values. Resolved irony thus predominates in these novels, but not as the vehicle of a complacent view of society: the irony is usually dependent on the perceived need for change in society, its resolution being posited on a belief in the possibility of such change. As such a belief weakens, an unresolved element becomes more evident in these novels, to predominate by the end of the century. The third chapter uses James' The Ambassadors to show how unresolved irony can result from an author's exploration of his subject beyond the confines of his declared intention. In thi's instance, it is argued, the unresolved irony is a function of a more complex view of his pro, tagonist than James seems to have foreseen. The fourth chapter develops this enquiry by showing that in The Wings of the Dove James' subject once again grew beyond the projected outline, but in this case with James fully avlare of the development. Unresolved irony, though still a product of "unintended" meanings, thus more consciously reflects a critical view of its subject. The fifth chapter adduces The Goleen Bowl as James' most sustained work of unresolved irony. It is the aim to demonstrate that the novel's meaning is entirely a function of this lack of resolution, the controlling vision being that of a society in which professed values are hopelessly at odds with true motives. Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence are consistently used for comparison and contrast with James, partly to demonstrate their awareness of the attractions· and dangers of irony as a response to perplexity, and partly to claim for James a place next to them as a profound commentator on the early twentieth century.

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Thèse doctorat : Littérature américaine : Nantes : 2007. / Bibliogr. p. 519-531.

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This thesis is an examination of Henry James and James McNeill Whistler as cultural analysts of modernity. Using the theoretical work of Peter Burger, Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno as a frame, I analyse James's and Whistler's theoretical and artistic responses to modernity and the problematic status of autonomous art and the modernist artist in late nineteenth century industrial capitalism. In so doing, I place both figures in their social and historical context and show how their work not only reflects but itself participates in the complex social and cultural transformations of late nineteenth century society. While Henry James has continued to attract critical attention from many quarters, those who have studied him in the larger context of nineteenth-century avant-garde culture are still relatively few. Of those contextual studies, none has examined James's career and work in the light of parallel developments in avant-garde visual art during this important and complex period. James McNeill Whistler, like Henry James an American expatriate working in late nineteenth century London, has been the subject of many studies describing his formal achievement; however, he has not yet attracted the attention of critics interested in theories of modernist representation, gender and sexuality. Because modernisation was a phenomenon which had an impact on all aspects of late nineteenth century culture, as both James and Whistler themselves acknowledge, my interdisciplinary, contextualist approach to cultural production can illuminate aspects of cultural theory and practice which might remain hidden in analyses contained within disciplinary boundaries. The present thesis is not primarily a work of art-historical scholarship nor is it an in-depth textual analysis of the Jamesian canon; it is an analysis of the ways in which two individuals deal with the conditions of their artistic practice. My thesis is original in its bringing together of two important figures - a writer and a visual artist - whose theory and practice reveals the complexity of early modern art's dialectical relationship with modernity. In so doing, I offer a critical reevaluation of the work of Henry James and James McNeill Whistler in light of its engagement with the discourses of modernity and modernism.

The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James, the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is expected or anticipated, yet always deferred. While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and “Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death. Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die. This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew.