The Portrait of a Lady (1881), obra de Henry James, conta a história da formação de Isabel Archer, uma jovem americana que se destaca por desejar ser livre e independente em um contexto em que se esperava da mulher que desempenhasse um papel apenas decorativo; por isso, é possível que sua caracterização seja associada a uma protagonista com características feministas. Porém, o desenvolvimento do enredo a leva a um casamento infeliz motivado por determinantes alheios, principalmente pelo interesse financeiro de outras personagens. Este trabalho tem o objetivo de analisar de que maneira a construção da subjetividade feminina da protagonista reflete, ou não, as questões sócio-históricas que marcaram seu contexto de criação, dentre os quais se destacam o início de uma consciência voltada à valorização feminina e busca pelos direitos das mulheres demonstrada pelo movimento pelo sufrágio universal. Em nossa análise consideramos os fatores sociais e políticos da época em que a obra foi escrita e revista, assim como os pressupostos da crítica literária feminista e crítica materialista, de forma a detectar na narrativa jamesiana as características que corroborem com um ponto de vista feminista sobre Isabel Archer, estendendo nossa leitura às personagens e fatos mais relevantes da obra. Assim, chegamos à conclusão de que a protagonista de The Portrait of a Lady apresenta características feministas, como o desejo pela independência, mas não pode ser considerada uma personagem feminista por ter sido subjugada e oprimida pelo poder patriarcal representado pelas figuras masculinas mais importantes à sua volta, principalmente por Gilbert Osmond, seu marido, que personifica nesta obra a dominação masculina total sobre a mente feminina. Contudo, sentimos que o enredo contém outras personagens e fatos que demonstram a força do insconsciente político daquele contexto, que se faz presente mesmo à revelia de seu autor, dentre eles outras personagens que caracterizam atitudes feministas. A importância deste estudo é posicionar uma forte protagonista feminina de Henry James dentre os estudos feministas sobre o Realismo do século XIX. / The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Henry James novel, tells the story of the formation of Isabel Archer, an young American lady who stands out for her desire to be free and independent in a context where nothing more was expected from a woman than having a decorative role; for that, it is possible that her charcterization is associated to a protagonist with feminist traits. However, the development of the plot leads her to an unhappy marriage motivated by outward determinants, especially by other characters financial interest. The objective of this work is to analyze how the construction of the protagonists feminine subjectivity either reflects or not the social and historical matters that marked its context of creation, among which the beginning of a consciousness aimed at a feminine appreciation and the search for the womens rights shown by the international suffrage movement. In our analysis we consider the social and political factors of the time when the novel was written and revised, as the assumptions of the feminist literary criticism and materialist criticism, in order to detect, in the Jamesian narrative, the characteristics that corroborate with a feminist point of view about Isabel Archer, and we extend our reading to the most relevant characters and events of the novel. So, we got to the conclusion that the protagonist in The Portrait of a Lady shows feminist characteristics, as the desire for independence, but she cannot be considered a feminist character for having been subjugated and oppressed by the patriarchal power represented by the most important masculine figures around her, mostly by Gilbert Osmond, her husband, who impersonates the total male domination over the female mind in this novel. Nevertheless, we feel that the plot contains other characters and events that demonstrate the strength of the political unconscious from a context that makes itself present even if unwanted by its author, and among them there are other characters that show feminist attitudes. The importance of this research is to establish a Henry James strong feminine protagonist in the feminist studies about the 19th century Realist literature.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Henry James was one of the most renowned writers at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century and is still known for his vast number of literary works and studies about the art of fiction. In his prefaces and critical essays, James discussed his own method of writing fiction, with a special focus on point of view and on issues related to the reception of his fictional work. In this sense, James also considered the importance of the role of the reader to the point of claiming in one of his prefaces: ―attentive reading, I avow, is what, at every point just like here, I completely invoke and hope for‖ (JAMES, 2009, p. 15). This dissertation discusses the construction of the fictional reader in two of James novels: The Portrait of a Lady (1886) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). Written twenty years apart from each other, these novels have meaningful similarities in their themes. The aim is to analyze how differences in the manipulation of point of view have implications to the rhetorical configuration of different readers in the two novels. In The Portrait of a Lady, James basically uses one single center of consciousness to narrate the story and constructs a reader that is gradually more participative and critical. In The Wings of the Dove, on the other hand, James opts for a more impersonal mode of presentation of the story, so the narrative is developed through several centers of consciousness. As a consequence, the configured reader is critical and inferential throughout the whole narrative because the gaps intentionally built by the writer have to be constantly filled. In short, our discussion shows that, along his career, Henry James projected readers that should be more and more critical. / Henry James é um dos escritores mais renomados da virada do século XIX para o século XX, conhecido por sua vasta produção literária e seus estudos sobre a arte da ficção. Em seus prefácios e ensaios de crítica literária, James discutiu o seu próprio método de escrita de ficção, com especial enfoque no foco narrativo, assim como questões relacionadas à recepção de sua obra ficcional. Assim, James também considerou a importância do papel do leitor: ―leitura atenta, confesso a propósito, é o que eu em cada ponto, como aqui, absolutamente invoco e espero‖ (JAMES, 1998, p. 19), exigia James em um de seus prefácios. Nesse sentido, neste trabalho discutimos a construção do leitor ficcional em dois de seus romances: The Portrait of a Lady (1886) e The Wings of the Dove (1902). Esses romances apresentam semelhanças temáticas significativas, apesar de terem sido escritos em um intervalo de quase vinte anos. Nosso objetivo é analisar como diferenças na elaboração do foco narrativo têm implicações para a configuração retórica de diferentes leitores. Em The Portrait of a Lady, James faz uso de basicamente um único centro de consciência para narrar a história e constrói um leitor gradualmente mais participativo e crítico. Já em The Wings of the Dove, James opta por um modo mais impessoal de apresentação da história, no qual a narrativa é desenvolvida por meio de diversos centros de consciência. Consequentemente, o leitor configurado é crítico e inferencial ao longo de toda a narrativa, pois é necessário que vazios intencionalmente deixados pelo escritor sejam preenchidos constantemente. Assim, nosso trabalho mostra que Henry James projetava leitores cada vez mais críticos na medida em que sua carreira avançava.

Hallucination was always the ghost story's elephant in the room. Even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the nineteenth century, tales of horror and the supernatural, of ghosts and demons, had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. Edgar Allan Poe's stories were full of mad narrators, conscience-stricken criminals and sinners, and protagonists who doubted their very eyes and ears. Writers such as Dickens and Le Fanu continued this idea of the cheat of the senses. But what is certainly true is that, towards the end of the century, hallucination took on a new force and significance in ghostly and horror fiction. Now, its presence was not the dominion of a handful of experimental thinkers but the province of popular authors writing very different kinds of stories. The approaches had become many and diverse, from Arthur Machen's ambivalent interest in occultism to Vernon Lee's passion for art and antiquity. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) is the most famous text to pose a question that was, in fact, being asked by many writers of the time: reality or delusion? Other writers, too, were forcing their readers to assess whether the ghostly had its origins in some supernatural phenomenon from beyond the grave, or from some deception within our own minds. This thesis explores the many factors which contributed to this rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience, during the period 1880-1914. From the time when psychical research became hugely popular, up until the First World War often considered a watershed in the history of the ghost story and literature in general something happened to the ghost story and related fiction. Through a close analysis of stories and novels written by Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Henry James, Arthur Machen, and Oliver Onions, I attempt to find out what happened, and even more importantly why it happened at all.

The thesis discusses the development of nineteenth century responses to the United States. It hinges upon the premise that travel writing is narrative and that the travelling itself must therefore be constructed (or reconstructed) as narrative in order to make it available for writing. By applying narratology to the work of literary travel writers from Frances Trollope to Henry James I show the influence of travelling point of view and writing point of view on the narrative. Where these two points of view are in conflict I suggest reasons for this and identify signs in the narrative which display the disparity. There are several influences on point of view which are discussed in the thesis. The first is mode of travel: the development of steamboats and later locomotives increasingly divested travellers from the landscape through which they were travelling. I concentrate on Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain travelling by boat, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James travelling by rail to examine how mode of travel alters travelling point of view and influences the form of travel writing. The second is the frontier: writing from a liminal space creates a certain point of view and makes travel not only a passage but a rite of passage. I examine travel texts which discuss the Western frontier as well as the transatlantic frontier. As the opportunity for these frontier experiences diminished through the spread of American culture and developments in travel technology, so the point of view of the traveller changes. A third point of view is provided by European ideas of nature and beauty in nature. The failure of these when put against American landscapes such as the Mississippi, prairies, and Niagara forms a significant part of the thesis, the fourth chapter of which examines writing on Niagara Falls in guidebooks and the travel texts of Frances Trollope, Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, Twain and James. Other points of view include seeing the United States through earlier travel texts and adopting a more autobiographical interest in travelogues. In the final chapter the thesis contains a discussion of the nature of truth in travel writing and the tendency towards fictionalisation. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for truth of having various travelling and writing points of view impact upon constructing narrative out of travel.

Using the psychological concepts of Theory of Mind and embodied cognition, the author explores and questions the traditional readings of Henry James's novel, The Golden Bowl, and its protagonist, Maggie Verver. Although the majority of critics view her as a positive character, James takes great effort to subvert her thoughts and mislead the reader. Despite lacking a modern technical vocabulary, James remains acutely aware of how human cognitive structures both process a text and function within a social setting.

This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation.

Since its publication in 1898, The Turn of the Screw has been the focus of diverse critical interpretation. It has reflected shifts in critical theory that include the Freudian, psychoanalytic, mythological, structuralist, reader-response, linguistic, and new-historical schools. The majority of critical interpretations have focused on the governess's narrative and have excluded the prologue, or frame narrative, that begins the novella. The critics who did examine the prologue overlooked James's departure from the traditional use of frame narration and the importance of the structure of the frame in creating a text of insoluble ambiguity. James departed from traditional frame narration in four ways. By using only an opening frame, the reader is forced to rely on the prologue in order to determine narrative reliability. By creating a condition of reciprocal authority between the unnamed narrator and Douglas, the opening frame denies the possibility of using either character to substantiate the reliability of the other. The condition of reciprocal authority is constructed through a dialogue pattern in which the narrator and Douglas interpret each other's gestures and comments and finish each other's sentences. It is the use of the pattern in the prologue that prepares the reader to accept it in the governess's narrative. The governess repeats the dialogue pattern with Mrs. Grose and Miles. Their discussions appear to validate the governess as a reliable narrator when in fact her reliability is as impossible to determine as the reliability of Douglas or the frame narrator. The result of these departures from traditional frame narration is the construction of a text of insoluble ambiguity.

In Henry James’s novel "The Ambassadors," James uses axiological language in tropes and in substantives, periphrastically replacing proper names. He also includes valuations in miscellaneous data contained in such differences as the one he makes in "The Ambassadors" between "Europe" (place) and "'Europe'" (concept). As well, James puts adjectival assessments of people and situations in the midst of these constructions and in the mouths of his characters, assessments which vary from those which contradict the value systems posited in the novel by various characters, through those which seem quizzical or ambiguous, to those whose meaning seems obvious under the circumstances. The argument of this critical work is that these attempts at naming tie in fundamentally with the ways in which James means for readers to interpret the identities of the characters and the events and are not merely ornamental. Even when James says that a character "didn’t know what to call" someone or something or when "identity" or a verbal equation for identity occurs in an odd context, James answers his own implied rhetorical question; he is not as problematic to read as is sometimes suggested. Our own valuations are encouraged to be close to the experience of Lambert Strether. Leading the reader through the maze of Strether’s experience, James gives many clear signals from the simplest elements of his complicated language even into the fabrication of his complex metaphors that he, though an explorer of the moral universe, is no relativistic iconoclast. In the examination of these issues, a choice has been made to draw eclectically upon various sources and techniques, from traditional "humanistic" modes of interpretation, rhetorical studies, structuralist and deconstructionist remarks, to existentialism, narratology, and identity studies. This choice is the result of an intention to access as many different "voices" as possible, in the attempt to be comprehensive about the voices of James and "The Ambassadors."

"Sounds of Terror" explores the interrelations between discourses of sound and the ghostly in Victorian novels and short stories. Narrative techniques used by Charles, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Mew are historically and culturally situated through their use of or reactions against acoustic technology. Since ghost stories and nvoels with gothic elements rely for the terrifying effects on tropes of liminality, my study consists of an analysis of an important yet largely unacknowledged species of these tropes: auditory metaphors. Many critics have examined the visual metaphors that appear in nineteenth-century fiction, but, until recently, aural representations have remain critically ignored. The aural itself represents the liminal or the numinous since sounds are less identifiable than visuals because of their ephemeral nature. My study shows the the significance of auditory symbols becomes increasingly intensified as the century progresses. Through analyses of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and short stories by Henry James ("The Altar of the Dead" and "In the Cage")and Charlotte Mew ("Passed" and "A White Night"), I argue that Victorian writers using gothic modes employ metaphors and symbolism as an alternative to frightening visual images--what could be heard or not heard proved terrifying and dreadful.

The main objectives of this thesis are to examine the relations between people and things in American novelist Henry James's 1897 novel The Spoils of Poynton, and thus to deepen our understanding of James's engagement with material culture. Critics have tended to frame James's works in general in terms of his detachment from economic and material reality; and criticisms on the novel in particular have seen it as exemplifying the alleged detachment, interpreting the things accumulated by a female collector at Poynton, as something illusory and unsubstantial, such as a form of commodity fetishism, a Freudian fetish, or a Lacanian signifier. Contrary to the conventional view, however, this thesis argues that James, in this novel about a struggle between a mother and her son over a house and its furnishings, represents and explores physical and affective relationships between the characters and things. James, focusing on the characters' sense experience, attempts to criticize the phallocentric power of his own culture that not only excludes women from the legal right of possession but also undervalues female domestic work in spite of its support for the culture. Drawing our attention to the senses that have traditionally been thought "lower" and "feminine," and thus refusing the taxonomization and hierarchization of the senses, James expands the category of aesthetic experience. This thesis argues that in the novel, by adopting as his primary mode of writing immediate sense experience prior to philosophical abstraction, James makes clear the latent implication between cultural repudiation of the feminine and the material, on the one hand, and the political and institutionalized exclusion of women by patriarchal property law, on the other. Criticism that ignores the material urgency and presence in the novel will further replicate that patriarchal power structure.