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Grotesque encounters in the travel writing of Henry James.(Critical Essay)

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From: Yearbook of English Studies
Date: 20040101
Author:Rawlings, Peter

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the question of why Henry James was so addicted to the use of the word 'picturesque', especially in Italian Hours, at a time when elsewhere it was regarded as an overworked, commercial mode of conceptualization. James exploited, it is argued, the unstable boundary between the 'grotesque' and the 'picturesque' (as did Edgar Allan Poe) found in the late eighteeth-century writings of William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and others, partly for homoerotic purposes. In Italian Hours, Ruskin's abhorrence of the 'low picturesque' is directly attacked as James ...

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