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- Title
'This Wild Hunt for Rest': Working at Play in The Ambassadors.
- Authors
Ross, Shawna
- Abstract
Both recent scholarship on the literature of travel and emergent theories of the transnational have ignored the key roles played by twentieth-century philosophies and institutions of leisure. This article begins to consider the cultural and material history of leisure as a significant trope in modernism by identifying an aesthetics of leisure developed in Henry James's letters and fiction, particularly his late novel The Ambassadors (1903). The critical charge of this novel, I argue, resides in its transformation of two contemporaneous discourses - the Protestant work ethic and its lesser-known but equally pervasive counterpart, the ideology of modern leisure - into an aesthetically productive dialectic of labor and leisure. Considering James's aesthetics of leisure as theme and style in his fiction and as a self-consciously elaborated mode of literary production in his non-fiction suggests the broader significance of leisure for modernism.
- Subjects
WORK ethic; NONFICTION novel; JAMES, Henry, 1843-1916; PROTESTANT work ethic; QUALITY of work life; MODERNISM (Literary period)
- Publication
Journal of Modern Literature, 2013, Vol 37, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0022-281X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/jmodelite.37.1.1