Henry James, Italian Hours

Pat Righelato (University of Reading)

Ed. by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1909

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Essays/ Lectures (any)
Non-Fiction
- Guidebooks / Travel writing

Resources

Italian Hours consists of essays (individual titles are given following quotations) that express James's responses to Italy over a period from 1870 to 1908. Most of them were originally published in American journals. Collected in book form in 1909, the title, echoing the author's earlier English Hours (1905), has devotional associations with the “hours” or prayers of Catholic ritual and the medieval illuminated Books of Hours, thus suggesting a religious intensity of aesthetic response, as John Auchard has noted in his Penguin edition of the text. The emphasis on time is also indicative of the author's long acquaintance with the country during the political and cultural changes that followed the 1870 unification …

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1866 words

Citation: Righelato, Pat. "Italian Hours". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=20111, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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