Henry James: Creating of Biography
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 82-1/-9
- Abstract:
The paper focuses upon the history of Henry James’s life-writing. Three main reasons for Henry James’s high priority for biographers are proposed: (1) James’s ambivalent attitude to the craft and ethics of literary biography; (2) paradoxical combination of James’s extreme privacy with huge epistolary legacy; (3) intriguing scenario of his postmortem popularity, determined by a specific way of self- fictionalizing. The contribution of such scholars as Leon Edel, Frank Kaplan, Sheldon Novick, Lyndall Gordon et al. is analyzed. Proliferation of biofictions about Henry James in 2000s (David Lodge, Colm Toibin, et al) is viewed as a result of James’s conscious automyth-making, which correlates with fictional elements in academic biographies of James. Fictionalizing of James’s life in academic biographies manifests itself in miming James’s idiolect, emphasizing the most dramatic events of his life, in accentuating ethically ambiguous episodes. Recent rethinking of James (self)image is based on blurring his sexual identification and on disavowing of the myth of a totally self-sufficient artist. The current situation in James’s life-writing may be characterized by travestying impulse (Richard Liebmann-Smith) and deconstruction of the academic myth-making mechanisms working in the very process of James’s biography-writing (Michael Anesco). The complicated and multidirectional (often reversive) process of myth-making and myth-destruction seems to be symptomatic of the current situation with Henry James life-writing. And that obviously sets it apart from an earlier state of matters (1990—2000s) when fictionalizing determined the main vector of the process.
- Keywords: Henry James, life writing, (auto)biographies, biofictions, public/private, fictionalization, mythmaking, demythologizing.
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