Forms of Nostalgia in Henry James’s “The American Scene”

Abstrakt

Henry James was not a sentimental writer. However, in his later books we can find traces of repressed emotions and melancholy. One of the most intriguing literary documents showing the nostalgic strain in James is his collection The American Scene (1907), a record of the novelist’s return to the USA after a twenty-years-old absence. It contains various manifestations of James’s nostalgia – for example, his memories of New York and his melancholic recollections of the places connected with his youth. Also, it shows James’s convoluted rhetoric of memory as a space of repression and displacement as well as his unwillingness to address these issues in a direct fashion.