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Living Europe: the alien impressions of Henry James and Lambert Strether
Manire, Damian Peter ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee) ; Procházka, Martin (advisor)
Lambert Strether's position in The Ambassadors is, in my view, a metafictional allegory for James's techniques of authorial perspective. As Donald Stone notes, "It was James's contribution to fiction that [...] he not only codified the subjective nature of the novelist, but transformed the hero of fiction into a limited [...] observer."170 James effectively expresses his authorial consciousness in a novel that courts a more complicated delegation of positional plays between reader, author, and subject. Thus, I disagree with William Stowe's assertion that The Ambassadors' theme of "how life can and ought to be lived" presents problems for which neither the novel's subject nor author "has a solution, problems that challenge the reader to [sic] reexamine the very valuation of European experience which the texts seems also to be promoting."171 Considering James's formal virtuosity, it becomes clear that James has more to express to the reader than the "valuation of European experience."172 Indeed, I hope it has been made clear over these last pages that "the solution" for how "to live" is fixed in Jamesian aestheticism. James broadcasts a double perspective that simultaneously engages the aesthetic along the social fissures of modernity, producing "masterpieces of presentational technique"173 to cite Malcolm...
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