Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction: A Clash of the Comparable
- Chapter I The Creation of the American in Paris: The American
- Chapter II The Splendor and Misery of the American Scientist: L'Ève future
- Chapter III The American Woman and the Invention of Paris: The Custom of the Country
- Chapter IV The Expatriate Idyll: The Sun Also Rises
- Chapter V Truths and Delusions: The Cold War in Les Mandarins
- Chapter VI Embracing American Culture: Cherokee
- Chapter VII An American Excursion into French Fiction: The Book of Illusions
- Chapter VIII Rerouting: Ça n'existe pas l'Amérique
- Chapter IX L'Américaine in Paris: Le Divorce
- Conclusion: Stasis and Movement
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Chapter I - The Creation of the American in Paris: The American
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction: A Clash of the Comparable
- Chapter I The Creation of the American in Paris: The American
- Chapter II The Splendor and Misery of the American Scientist: L'Ève future
- Chapter III The American Woman and the Invention of Paris: The Custom of the Country
- Chapter IV The Expatriate Idyll: The Sun Also Rises
- Chapter V Truths and Delusions: The Cold War in Les Mandarins
- Chapter VI Embracing American Culture: Cherokee
- Chapter VII An American Excursion into French Fiction: The Book of Illusions
- Chapter VIII Rerouting: Ça n'existe pas l'Amérique
- Chapter IX L'Américaine in Paris: Le Divorce
- Conclusion: Stasis and Movement
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
La France est une nation exemplaire, dont la vocation était de guider l'humanité autant par sa puissance politique effective que par sa créativité culturelle et scientifique – une vision que partageaient aussi bien les conservateurs que les progressistes.
(Sudhir Hazareesingh, Ce pays qui aime les idées, 230)By the mid-nineteenth-century, America was already a synonym in certain French circles for whatever was disturbing or unfamiliar about the present.
(Tony Judt, Past Imperfect, 188)It's a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner.
(Nathaniel Willis, Pencillings by the Way, 8)When Christopher Newman, the main character in Henry James's The American (1877), first strolls into the Louvre's Salon Carré, his presence there has no ramifications for art history. However, in a modest manner, his ensuing activities will add a dimension to the development of American fiction, since his story is among the first dealing with the adventures of an American abroad. Yet Newman's most important impact will not be precisely in the area of literary aesthetics. Rather, his experiences or, more properly, the experiences which his creator affords him, will have an influence in the broader realm of Franco-American cultural history. In the personage of Christopher Newman, Henry James created an enduring image of the American in Paris, an image, as will be seen, greatly indebted to Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique (1835). What proved to be a creation more specific to James is the image of the French, negative in the extreme, which would come to have a broad currency in the American imagination. These two images of the American and the French person, simplistic in both instances, were nevertheless destined to persist with several permutations right up to the end of the twentieth-century. Yet the irony regarding James's portrayals of Americans abroad and, to a much greater degree, his depictions of the French, is that neither image was based in any significant way on James's experiences with Americans in Paris or any group of French people who might by whatever standard be considered typical. What instigated the development of these representations and provided in large measure the impetus for the writing of The American was an experience James had in the theater in 1876.
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- Frères EnnemisThe French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature, pp. 13 - 39Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018