{"title":"Race, Rent, and the Grid: Structure and Culture in Henry James's \"The Jolly Corner\"","authors":"Brian Gingrich","doi":"10.1353/elh.2024.a922012","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay examines Henry James's story \"The Jolly Corner\" (1908) to address the obscurity of race and class in turn-of-the-century, late-realist literature. It seeks to identify signs of social difference in such a text, not simply in the occasions when it becomes distinct but in the genre's underlying tendency toward indistinctness. Above all, it links the structural impulses of James's craft to the grid-based topography of Manhattan, and it represents that link in diagrams that reveal, through his story, views on immigration, nativism, leisure, labor, and race that provide a new approach to understanding James and his historical moment.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ELH","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2024.a922012","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract: This essay examines Henry James's story "The Jolly Corner" (1908) to address the obscurity of race and class in turn-of-the-century, late-realist literature. It seeks to identify signs of social difference in such a text, not simply in the occasions when it becomes distinct but in the genre's underlying tendency toward indistinctness. Above all, it links the structural impulses of James's craft to the grid-based topography of Manhattan, and it represents that link in diagrams that reveal, through his story, views on immigration, nativism, leisure, labor, and race that provide a new approach to understanding James and his historical moment.