Henry James Writes New York Identity Masculinity Authorship Leonardo Buonomo by Leonardo Buonomo 9783031681264, 3031681266 instant download after payment.

This book intends to show how, for James, the city of New York, whether described in private or portrayed in fiction and non-fiction, always remained an essential component of his identity, a space he could never renounce even after settling in England permanently in the mid-1870s. In particular, the analysis of his literary production reveals how, for all his cosmopolitanism and his choice of England as the only place where he could achieve his full potential as a writer, James kept returning to the city where he was born on 15 April 1843 and which, in the words of Andrew Taylor, “would inspire, challenge and confront him for the rest of his life” (4). While his actual trips home became infrequent in the second part of his life, his revisitations of New York were numerous and meaningful where it most counted for him: on the written page. Moreover, I contend that as an author, he could not stay away for long, because New York was the scene of his earliest family memories, as well as the urban landscape that had first stimulated and nurtured his powers of observation. In addition, the city compelled him, as perhaps no other place in the world, to confront his status as an American-born male artist and his age’s prevailing notions of gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, and more generally success. As Martha Banta has pointed out, “Growing up in the 1840s and 1850s, James learned early that being demonstrably ‘masculine’ in America was mainly associated with the making of money”