Death in Henry James [Hardcover]

Moving beyond established ideas of haunted Henry James, this book argues that death is as important a concept for understanding James's fiction as gender, sexuality and modernity, which have come to dominate James studies. Combining formal analysis and close reading with theoretical and historical approaches and focusing on key novels and tales from across James's career, Andrew Cutting explores five instances of Jamesian death: sacrifice, the corpse, morbidity, afterlife and demography. This is the first full-length study of this subject.Acknowledgements Note on the Texts Introduction PART 1: VIOLENCE ASHAMED: SACRIFICE IN RODERICK HUDSON Fait Accompli Accident, Suicide and Murder Scapegoat The Princess Casamassima War Artist PART 2: CORPSES AND THE CORPUS Deathbed Necrophilia Abjection Vanishing James's Life/Death Mask PART 3: THE WINGS OF THE DOVE AND THE MORBID Degeneration Seeing Death Rooms and Tombs Style, the Cult of the Dead and Mourning PART 4: AFTERLIVES Communicating with the Future Out-Thinking Death: 'Is there a Life after Death?' Biographobia and the Reader as Legatee Ex-novelist PART 5: DEMOGRAPHY IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY Calculation, the Crowd, and the Sublime Framing Life Mortality in James's Population Notes Bibliography Index

'There are two problems with Cutting's enterprise: life, and death. They are brilliantly brought together in the most innovative section of his work, through the image of a cast of Henry James's face which also provides his wonderfully disturbing dust jacket.' - Times Literary Supplement

ANDREW CUTTING is Senior Lecturer in Humanities Information Technology in the Department of Humanities, Arts and Languages at London Metropolitan University, UK.