Abstract
‘What shall we call our “self”? Where does it begin? Where does it end?’ These questions about identity, voiced by the American Madame Merle in Chapter 19 of James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), permeate nineteenth-century American literature. They concern not only personal and national identity, but also the identity of the literary works themselves. ‘What shall we call our “self”? Where does it begin? Where does it end?’ are questions novels and poems discussed in this book are asking about their own nature.
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Notes
F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (eds), The Notebooks of Henry James (New York, 1947), p. 24.
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© 1991 Stuart Hutchinson
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Hutchinson, S. (1991). James: The American Scene (1907). In: The American Scene. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373198_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373198_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39011-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37319-8
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