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Ghost stories by henry james5/9/2023 His most famous and influential supernatural tale, The Turn of the Screw, is considered by many - including Stephen King - to be the exemplar of the ghost story: a tale of haunted children, demonic possession, sexual frustration, and psychological terror. And yet, for all his love of manners, whit, upper middle class malaise, and psychological realism, James returned time and time again throughout his career to a genre which seemed so at odds with his oeuvre: the Gothic ghost story. Henry James has long been heralded as a master of transatlantic realism, a cosmopolitan observer of human nature, and a bone-dry contributor to the novel of manners - a blue-blooded chronicler of polite society's stifled human dramas in the tradition of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Balzac, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Kipling, and de Maupassant - a thoroughly European pedigree befitting a man who left the United States in his youth and returned only twice before his death. The terror of exposure, of reality and confrontation. His fiction is impressionistic, psychological, and "courtly," but it has one pervasive emotion to it: unease - discomfort, awkwardness, and a lurking shame buried in intentional secrecy. He was not one for terror, or even horror.
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