American Naturalism: Two Concepts of American Identity in the Works of Henry James and Stephen Crane

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miklas Pascal Sauermann
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Stephen Crane ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Naturalism

Hydraulics and Heroics: William James and Stephen Crane

Prospects ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
William Wasserstrom
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
New World ◽  
William James ◽  
Stephen Crane ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
The Golden Bowl ◽  
European Women

Unquestioning faith in an equilibrium of stasis: it is this flaw of temperament, this European fault of social and moral intelligence that separates European women from their American counterparts in nineteenth-century literature. Particularly in Henry James's fiction women of distinctively New World bearing, young women bred to combine stamina with delicacy of spirit, stubbornness with flexibility, reared to disavow perfectly held balances in favor of riskier angles of poise—James's exemplary women conduct their lives along lines of equilibrium more flowing than European, less stiff by far, lines and angles that parallel the mode and style and history of the society they embody, a society shaped at hazard and given to gamble. It is indeed in his masterwork, The Golden Bowl, a fatidic text anticipating which myth of order would shape American high style during the industrial age, that James devised a program intended to discredit stasis and extol movement without forswearing form. In descent as well as dissent from a Swedenborgian father, both Henry James and his brother William endorsed a creed of “vital equilibrium.” And this American ideology presupposed the existence or cultivation of a self galvanized by “balance/imbalance,” a dynamics of tension which provides a constant feature of motive in our classic literature.

Henry James

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Woolf
Keyword(s):  
Henry James
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