The Jolly Corner Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 68 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Jolly Corner.

The Jolly Corner Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 68 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Jolly Corner.
This section contains 3,602 words
(approx. 10 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Jolly Corner Study Guide

In the following essay, Bier shows how Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe provided a model and an "anti-model," respectively, for "The Jolly Corner."

We know how much James admired and identified himself with Hawthorne. He not only wrote the first extended critical study of Hawthorne but manifestly used him as a model for his own work: the general moral orientation, including Hawthorne's concept of the Unpardonable Sin of human manipulation; the cool cerebral style and distancing technique; the careful effects of subtlety and ambiguity; and the famous disenchantment, exemplary and then strategic for James, with the impoverished and sometimes repelling American scene.

But if James's conscious literary and psychological model was Hawthorne, he had also an antimodel or alter ego, and that was Hawthorne's opposite number, Poe. It was Poe, that is, in all his intensity and intermittent power, but whose qualities were always purchased at...

(read more)

This section contains 3,602 words
(approx. 10 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Jolly Corner Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
The Jolly Corner from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.