European Landscape and American Experience

This work attempts to analyze how the European
landscape is intricately linked with Henry James's
American protagonists in his last three major
novels: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and
The Golden Bowl. This study proposes that the study
of European landscape provides one different yet
plausible approach to interpret James's last three
major novels. Through the experiences of the
innocent Americans, the significance of European
landscape is highlighted and intensified. Places,
such as Paris, Venice, and London, are essential
because they provide contrastive settings that
conserve the very tone and quality of European
cultural refinement. More importantly, these places
evoke, reflect, and enhance the characters'
experiences there. The European landscape hence
serves as a kind of extrasensory playground for the
central reflectors to engage themselves in a
different kind of conscious journey concurrent with the physical one. It is also elevated from a mere
geographical and cultural territory to that of the
literary--to a kind of fictionalized and versified
territory similar to literary texts.

Autorentext

Mei-ling Chao is currently Associate Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Nanhua University, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in 2009.

Klappentext

This work attempts to analyze how the European landscape is intricately linked with Henry James's American protagonists in his last three major novels: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. This study proposes that the study of European landscape provides one different yet plausible approach to interpret James's last three major novels. Through the experiences of the innocent Americans, the significance of European landscape is highlighted and intensified. Places, such as Paris, Venice, and London, are essential because they provide contrastive settings that conserve the very tone and quality of European cultural refinement. More importantly, these places evoke, reflect, and enhance the characters' experiences there. The European landscape hence serves as a kind of extrasensory playground for the central reflectors to engage themselves in a different kind of conscious journey concurrent with the physical one. It is also elevated from a mere geographical and cultural territory to that of the literary--to a kind of fictionalized and versified territory similar to literary texts.