从《淑女本色》论理想和现实的冲突(2)
1.1 Henry James’s Place in Modern American Literature
Henry James, was born in New York City into a wealthy family, is crowned for the series of novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans., and deserves being called a literary tycoon in world literature for his own distinctive writing style and angle of view in literary production due to his early years’ broad education and his bilateral experiences throughout the first 20 years of his life between America and Europe, His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception. He was not only a novelist, but also a psychologist, a literary critic, and a dramatist. “James is considered to be a major influence on the work of many authors, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. He has long been admired for his great literary skill, and his ability to create profound and innovative psychological portraits. ”（Kelly, 1996:3）It is no wonder that Henry James has been regarded as the master of the literature and western pioneer of the modern novel.
In his youth James travelled back and forth between Europe and America. As a novelist, short-story writer and critic, James was particularly keen on European history and traditions and the former manners of its upper class. Although his work was not fully accepted until years after his death, his tales of independent, yet naïve, Americans encountering the cultivated, subtle influences of European society made him famous.（c.f. Kevin Kelly, 1996:1）. Throughout his later life, James experimented in writing and developed refinements in the handling of point of view and commented in many essays on these practice so that his theories of art have been instructive to many later writers. (Dai Weidong, 2009:85) Among his novels which were first considered unsuccessful and later became the masterpieces of the modern American literary works are the American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).