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Henry James and the “Aliens” intervenes substantially in current debates in James studies, most notably in the key areas of cultural studies, ethnic studies and queer studies. Focusing throughout on questions of identity, and most prominently on how the latter is given shape in the very form of the late style, the book finds that James’s response to the ethnic other can be grasped neither as an attempt to police, supervise and master the other, nor as a politics of non-identical surrender to that other. Instead, there is a continuum of identity—akin to the “criminal continuity” that James registers throughout the American scene—in which self and other, native and alien, subject and object adopt alternate roles of control and submission. Both are at times in possession of the American scene and possessed by that scene. Jamesian sexual identity, too, proves to be constantly reconstituted in transitive processes of signification that make it impossible to fix the “I” or the “other” within a fixed framework—be that framework a heterosexual or a homosexual one. The eroticism that strikingly informs the late James can therefore only be captured, if at all, under the rubric of the “queer.”
Price: $149.00
Pages: 164
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies
Publication Date:
01 January 2002
ISBN: 9789042012806
Format: Paperback
Awarded the American Studies Network Book Prize 2004.
From the Jury report: “Gert Buelens of the University of Ghent, Belgium, is the author of Henry James and the “Aliens” in Possession of the American Scene (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002). This book is an excellent analysis of Henry James’s The American Scene. But it is much more than just an accurate analysis of this text. The author also analyzes the relevant and recent studies on James’s themes of race, class and gender, and he makes readers rethink the whole of James’s production through such key lenses as “the aliens,” “consumerism,” and “homoeroticism.” Buelens pays an impeccable attention to style and vocabulary and his rich knowledge of all the most important studies on each of these categories lends his book an extraordinary depth. To offer new and fresh insights in a seemingly endless stream of Henry James studies is, indeed, an extraordinary achievement and therefore this book is awarded the American Studies Network Book Prize 2004.”
From the Jury report: “Gert Buelens of the University of Ghent, Belgium, is the author of Henry James and the “Aliens” in Possession of the American Scene (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2002). This book is an excellent analysis of Henry James’s The American Scene. But it is much more than just an accurate analysis of this text. The author also analyzes the relevant and recent studies on James’s themes of race, class and gender, and he makes readers rethink the whole of James’s production through such key lenses as “the aliens,” “consumerism,” and “homoeroticism.” Buelens pays an impeccable attention to style and vocabulary and his rich knowledge of all the most important studies on each of these categories lends his book an extraordinary depth. To offer new and fresh insights in a seemingly endless stream of Henry James studies is, indeed, an extraordinary achievement and therefore this book is awarded the American Studies Network Book Prize 2004.”