Henry James and the Visual by Kendall Johnson - 9780521880664

Henry James and the VisualAuthor(s): Kendall Johnson\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521880664, 978-0521880664\nSynopsis\nIn the decades after the Civil War, how did Americans see the world and their place in it? In this text, Kendall Johnson argues that Henry James appealed to his readers' sense of vision to dramatise the ambiguity of American citizenship in scenes of tense encounter with Europeans. By reviving the eighteenth-century debates over beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, James weaves into his narratives the national politics of emancipation, immigration, and Indian Removal. For James, visual experience is crucial to the American communal identity, a position that challenged prominent anthropologists as they defined concepts of race and culture in ways that continue to shape how we see the world today. To demonstrate the cultural stereotypes that James reworked, the book include.