"Cliff Notes - Daisy Miller" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Henry James had a profound influence on the development of the
modern novel. Much of his literary innovation is related to the
scientific innovation of the time, in particular to the work of
his brother William. Psychology was a new science in Henry
James's day; William James is credited with doing much to
introduce the discipline to the medical community and to the
general public. As a writer of fiction, James worked in the
same direction. He explored what his characters were thinking
as well as what they were doing. To that end he sought a prose
style that would accurately follow the twists and turns of
peoples' thoughts. It's a style that struck many readers of his
day (and some today) as unnecessarily abstract and convoluted,
but that for many others is a brilliant mirroring of the way the
human mind works. This skill led the great twentieth-century
American poet, Ezra Pound, to describe James's writing as "pages
of diagnosis."

James also experimented with restricting the point of view in
his fiction. Rather than have a narrator tell you what to
think, James allows you to hear characters--for example, the
governess who narrates most of The Turn of the Screw--express
their own thoughts. You are then free to make up your own mind
about them.

With these experiments, James was developing the psychological
novel, a form in which the inner lives of the characters receive
more attention than do their external actions. He was paving
the way for the more modern literary form known as "stream of
consciousness," where the prose reflects the supposedly unedited
internal thoughts of the characters. (This phrase, often used
to describe novels by twentieth-century writers like James Joyce
and Virginia Woolf, itself comes from the work of William
James.)

James was highly productive: among his works are twenty novels,
one hundred twelve tales, several plays, autobiographical
writings, literary studies, and travel impressions. He was also
highly social: though he never married, he was a frequent
dinner and weekend guest in English aristocratic and literary
circles, circles in which he observed much of the behavior that
found its way into his works. Though he associated with the
very rich, he was never really one of them--the image of him as
an independently wealthy man who could afford the luxury of
being a writer has been proved untrue, for throughout his
lifetime he supported himself on the modest income from his
writing. The money he borrowed from his father was repaid with
earnings from literary endeavors, and the small inheritance he
received upon his father's death was contributed to the support
of his ill sister Alice. Particularly toward the end of his
life, his friends worried about his finances, knowing that his