Overview

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the gendered power relations in James’s novels. Reading James’s narrative form through the lens of relational sociology, specifically Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic domination, reconciles some of the most fiercely disputed positions in James studies of the past decades. The close readings focus on three novels, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, providing a systematic relational analysis into the specifically Jamesian method of narrating the socio-psychological, embodied responses to masculine power and oppression. James persistently narrates his characters as social agents whose perception, affects, and bodily practices are products of the social structures that they in turn continue to shape and reproduce. The chapters trace a development throughout James’s career that reflects a growing sensitivity for the concealment and attendant misrecognition of gendered domination.

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9783030441111

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“Each of these monographs hones in on a single author, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell, respectively. Emphasizing how gender enactments differ from one text to another even when constructed by the same authorial hand, this choice allows these monographs to highlight the multiplicities of and cultural dependences of gender, a task in which they are deeply invested.” (Bianca Perez-Cancino, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (3), 2023)

Author Information

Wibke Schniedermann is a postdoctoral researcher at Giessen University, Germany. She received a PhD from Frankfurt University, Germany, and has published on Henry James, poverty and homelessness in U.S. culture, surveillance cultures, and the depiction of class issues in serial television. Her research focuses on narrative representation of space, affect, and inequality.

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