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This essay suggests that Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" (1888) is obliquely conscious of the history of Giorgione, whose fading frescoes on the Fondaco dei' Tedeschi at Venice emblematized for nineteenth-century critics the mysteriously lost biography of a great artist. Goiorgione's achievement had been most prominently discussed before James's tale in Pater's "The School of Giorgione" (1877), which produced a model of artistic identity that was both shadowy and celebrated . Pater was partly referring to himself, but his formulation of a more general notion of mysterious fame haunted the complex transactions of James's tale. Considering the history of Giorgione in "The Aspern Papers" focuses critical attention away from the well-recognized issue of the dangerous invasions of biography towards its investment in a concept of artistic identity that remains both fêted and secret.
This essay suggests that Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" (1888) is obliquely conscious of the history of Giorgione, whose fading frescoes on the Fondaco dei' Tedeschi at Venice emblematized for nineteenth-century critics the mysteriously lost biography of a great artist. Goiorgione's achievement had been most prominently discussed before James's tale in Pater's "The School of Giorgione" (1877), which produced a model of artistic identity that was both shadowy and celebrated . Pater was partly referring to himself, but his formulation of a more general notion of mysterious fame haunted the complex transactions of James's tale. Considering the history of Giorgione in "The Aspern Papers" focuses critical attention away from the well-recognized issue of the dangerous invasions of biography towards its investment in a concept of artistic identity that remains both fêted and secret.
" was rejected by a Philadelphia magazine because (a friend surmised) "it could only have passed with the Philadelphia critic for 'an outrage on American girlhood'" (NT 18: v). It was serialized, nonetheless, by one magazine in London, pirated by another in Boston, and published as a book on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as included within James's short-story collections. The novella divided the world (William Dean Howells claimed) into "Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites" and was adapted for the stage but never produced. In its most recent form, "Daisy Miller" appeared as Peter Bogdanovich's 1974 motion picture, in which Bogdanovich's then-girlfriend, Cybill Shepherd, embodied the pouting ingénue. "Daisy Miller" also appeared in a hitherto neglected, visual, but pre-cinematic Jamesian form. The artist Harry Whitney McVickar and the editors at Harper and Brothers published the first illustrated "Daisy Miller" in 1892, fourteen years after readers formed their initial mental pictures of Daisy but some eighty years before Shepherd's movie portrayal. Daisy's first illustrator probably knew her as "an outrage on American girlhood" when he staged her visual-arts debut. The heroine and the novella already had a reputation, one might say, when Daisy Miller made her first appearance in visual illustrations. One might well say that-if, indeed, she had fully appeared in the edition's illustrations. In truth, she does not. McVickar's images for his 1892 "Daisy Miller" virtually omit the heroine. They consign her to a stylish frontispiece that depicts her at a distance (and shows her from the back). They never once picture her face directly nor grant readers a view of her profile. McVickar seems in fact to present everything but Daisy, as fancy curlicues, elaborate calligraphy, renderings of sugar cubes, Alpine landscapes, and depictions of minor characters adorn the volume and manifest McVickar's attention to design and decorum but leave uninformed observers, who pick up the volume at random, without a clue as to the tale's conflict, Winterbourne's
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