Henry James : Collected Travel Writings : The Continent : A Little Tour in France / Italian Hours / Other Travels (Library of America) - Hardcover

James, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0940450771 ISBN 13: 9780940450776

Publisher: Library of America, 1993

Synopsis

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 classic A 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 in Italian 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 Pyrénées, including a memorable account of the American volunteer ambulance corps in Europe during World War One.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is 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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

The Library of America is an award-winning, nonprofit program dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as "the most important book-publishing project in the nation's history" (Newsweek), this acclaimed series is restoring America's literary heritage in "the finest-looking, longest-lasting edition ever made" (New Republic).

From the Back Cover:

This volume brings together James's writings on Great Britain and America. The essays of English Hours convey the freshness of James's "wonderments and judgments and emotions" on first encountering the country that became his adopted home for half a century. He captures the immensely varied life of London in a series of walks through that "murky, modern Babylon", which contains "the most romantic town-vistas in the world". Lively vignettes of a winter visit to an unfashionable watering place and excursions to the cathedral towns of Wells and Salisbury are followed by a haunting evocation of the desolate Suffolk coast at Dunwich. James includes vivid accounts of a New Year's weekend at a perfectly appointed country house, midsummer dog days in London, and the spectacle of the Derby at Epsom. In every essay he enriches his portrait of the English character, governed by social conventions and yet prone to startling eccentricities. Joseph Pennell's delightful illustrations, which appeared in the original 1905 edition, are reprinted with James's text. In The American Scene (1907) James revisits his native country after a twenty-year absence, traveling throughout the eastern United States from Boston to Florida. Views of the Hudson River arouse memories of his own past - the river "seemed to stretch back...to the earliest outlook of my consciousness", he writes. James's poignant rediscovery of what remained of the New York of his childhood ("the precious stretch of space between Washington Square and Fourteenth Street") contrasts with his impression of the modern, commercial New York, a new city representing "a particular type of dauntless power, ..crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history?" Edmund Wilson, who praised The American Scene's "magnificent solidity and brilliance", remarked that "it was as if...his emotions had suddenly been given scope, his genius for expression liberated". Sixteen essays on traveling in England, Scotland, and America conclude this volume. The essays, most of which have never before been collected, range from early pieces on London, Saratoga, and Newport, to articles on World War I that are among James's final writings.

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0940450771
• ISBN 13: 9780940450776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 845
• Editor: Howard Richard