Mills, Adelais Dorland;
(2020)
Henry James and the Work of Responsibility.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This is a study of responsibility, its meaning and implications, in the criticism and fiction of Henry James. Grounded in close reading, but situating itself at the intersection of philosophy and literature, the thesis begins by exploring how one type of responsibility, defined by the accountability of the free agent, has overly informed critical interpretations of the author’s novels. The project probes the limitations of these readings by remarking upon the idiosyncratic connotations of the word in James’s lexicon and the unusual experiential contours of the concept in the novels and non-fiction. Engaging with the crucial role that response plays in James’s consideration of responsibility, initial chapters propose to catalyse a re-examination of this subject by placing it in proximity to the work of philosophers for whom responsiveness is comparably central to their mapping of responsibility. In subsequent chapters, the thesis turns to investigate the ways in which James’s work is marked by misgivings regarding the relocation of the concept on to grounds far more ambiguous than those provided for it by a metaphysics of sovereignty and self-rule. This project addresses itself to a pivotal and omnipresent subject in James; accordingly, it considers an extensive range of texts, but with particular attention given to the essays on Honoré de Balzac (1875–1913), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–1909), Roderick Hudson (1875), The Bostonians (1886), and The Awkward Age (1899). These texts, their aesthetics and the dramas they delineate, are shaped, I argue, in hitherto uncharted ways by the possibilities and discontents inherent to a responsibility signaling a relational process of receiving and answering another.
Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
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Qualification: | Ph.D |
Title: | Henry James and the Work of Responsibility |
Event: | UCL |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2020. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10094274 |
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