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Henry James: Travel Writings Vol. 2 (LOA #65)

Henry James: Travel Writings Vol. 2 (LOA #65)

The Continent

by Henry James and Richard Howard
Hardback
Publication Date: 01/09/1993

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Henry James's travel writings are at once literary masterpieces, unsurpassed guidebooks and penetrating reflections on the international themes familiar from his fiction.This volume, the second of two, begins with the classicA Little Tour in France(1900), illustrated with Joseph Pennell's exquisite drawings from the original edition. James begins his tour of the French countryside one rainy morning in mid-September of 1882, when he sets off for the city of Tours as a means of exploring the proposition that "though France might be Paris, Paris was by no means France."

From Tours, Balzac's birthplace, James travels to the great chateaux of the Loire Valley, visiting Chambord, Amboise, Chenonceaux, and Blois, where, as you cross the threshold, "you step straight into the sunshine and storm of the French Renaissance." Dense with literary associations and historical echoes, James's prose brings castles and cathedrals and old walled towns to life. In his glancingly precise visual evocations of terrain and cityscape, he realizes his ambition "to sketch without a palette or brushes."

Henry James loved Italy, "a beautiful disheveled nymph" to England's "good married matron." The incisive and witty essays inItalian Hours(1909) describe memorably happy sojourns in Venice, Rome, and Florence, and excursions to Siena, Assisi, Perugia, Capri, Ravenna, and other Italian cities. "Nowhere do art and life seem so interfused" as in Venice, wrote James in celebration of the splendor of Venetian light and color, air, and history. He records his radiant impressions of Roman churches and aqueducts, museums and fountains, and rambles through the gardens of the Villa Borghese in spring, when Rome seems lighted "with an irresistible smile." All these essays are filled with James's intense pleasure in Italian places and people.

This volume concludes with sixteen essays on such varied places as Switzerland, Holland, Rheims, and the Pyrenees, including a memorable account of the American volunteer ambulance corps in Europe during World War One.

LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
ISBN:
9780940450776
9780940450776
Category:
Classic fiction
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
01-09-1993
Language:
English
Publisher:
The Library of America
Country of origin:
United States
Pages:
868
Dimensions (mm):
208x131x36mm
Weight:
0.73kg
Henry James

Henry James was born in New York in 1843 and was educated in Europe and America. He left Harvard Law School in 1863, after a year's attendance, to concentrate on writing, and from 1869 he began to make prolonged visits to Europe, eventually settling in England in 1876.

His literary output was prodigious and of the highest quality: more than ten outstanding novels, including The Portrait of a Lady and The American; countless novellas and short stories; as well as innumerable essays, letters, and other pieces of critical prose. Known by contemporary fellow novelists as 'the Master', James died in Kensington, London, in 1916.

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