Henry James's Grandly Vague and Abstract Periodic Style and Its Partial Reversal in The Ambassadors

DOI

10.2991/icassee-17.2018.52How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Henry James; The Ambassadors; Strether; grandly vague and abstract periodic style; climactic revelation

Abstract

Henry James partially reverses his grandly vague and abstract periodic style with fewer periodic sentences, abstract subjects, and non-transitive verbs late in The Ambassadors to imply that the protagonist Strether has changed his vague vision. He adopts elegant variation to delay the specification of the referents. The strategy of periodic postponement operates in the larger matters of characterisation, theme and plot arrangement, as well as in the sentence structure. James's periodic structure is embodied in the arrangement of the climactic revelation in the river scene nearly at the end of the novel. The enlightenment regarding his periodic sentences and the whole plot comes retrospectively at the end where all the complicated elements of meaning and scene fit synoptically into a whole. An apparent complication of James's style may find its justification in its integral and comprehensive thematic implications, and the resulting surprising and ironical effects. Henry James is great as a modern periodic master.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ling Wang
PY  - 2017/12
DA  - 2017/12
TI  - Henry James's Grandly Vague and Abstract Periodic Style and Its Partial Reversal in The Ambassadors
BT  - Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education (ICASSEE 2017)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 235
EP  - 238
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icassee-17.2018.52
DO  - 10.2991/icassee-17.2018.52
ID  - Wang2017/12
ER  -