{"product_id":"prepossessing-henry-james-the-strange-freedom-9781032058658","title":"Prepossessing Henry James: The Strange Freedom","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe novels of Henry James are filled with ghosts, but most of them escape dramatic treatment. These elusive specters are the voices of precursors that haunt his narratives, compromising their constitutive freedom. \u003ci\u003eThe Strange Freedom\u003c\/i\u003e is an examination of the ways James's fiction is prepossessed by some major voices of the English literary tradition: those of Shakespeare, Richardson, Fielding, Gibbon, Thackeray, and Dickens. This subtextual arrogation sets constrains to the unfolding, in James's narratives, of liberal and romantic freedom-it places limits both to the absolute exemptions of aesthetic interest and to radical Bohemian abandon. But these constrains and limits can be regarded, dialectically, as the enabling conditions of the very liberty they imperil. Drawing on recent research on the spectral dynamics and indirections of literary influence by scholars like Adrian Poole, Philip Horne, Nicola Bradbury, Tamara Follini, and Peter Rawlings, but also on earlier deconstructive work by John Carlos Rowe, \u003ci\u003ePrepossessing Henry James\u003c\/i\u003e offers a speculative account of the way James is simultaneously resourced and restrained by his sources. Along the way, we discover how Hamlet's ghost instills in James a fantasy of mental autonomy, or how he adapts Gibbon's Enlightened narrative to inhibit civic liberty with images of female sacrifice. We see the governess in \u003ci\u003eThe Turn of the Screw\u003c\/i\u003e possessed by the specter of Richardson's Pamela, exposing social freedoms with liberal brutality. We encounter Gray, in \u003ci\u003eThe Ivory Tower\u003c\/i\u003e, striving to obtain personal freedom by repressing Dickensian \"figures, monstruous, fantastic.\" And, finally, we recognize how much \u003ci\u003eThe Ambassadors\u003c\/i\u003e owes to the ambiguous manner of Thackeray. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJulián Jiménez Heffernan\u003c\/strong\u003e (Ph.D. Bologna, Italy) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Córdoba, Spain. He has authored three books on Shakespeare, co-edited the collection \u003ci\u003eCommunity in Twentieth-Century Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e (2013), and published many essays on Renaissance philosophy, deconstruction, and modern fiction--from Samuel Richardson to Nadine Gordimer. He is currently working on a book on Karl Marx and William Thackeray. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Routledge","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50393281822994,"sku":"9781032058658","price":197.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_110c9ea9-0010-4a03-9683-7ee235d5a02e.jpg?v=1728987670","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/prepossessing-henry-james-the-strange-freedom-9781032058658","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}