The Power of Place: Aesthetic and Semiotic Function of Landscape in Henry James' The Europeans - An Interdisciplinary Study

Document Type : Original research articles

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Department of English language, literature, and simultaneous interpretation, Faculty of Humanities, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

Recently, due to the lockdown of the whole world after the spread of Covid 19, the significance of spatiality and the dynamic relations among space, place, and culture has now become an important approach to the humanities. In the discourse of postmodernism, place appears as a key concept in literary studies to determine the cultural dimensions of the human experience. This paper is an attempt to bring to focus the importance of place in culture-oriented literary texts. The most suitable ones for the purpose of this study are those that deal with the “international theme” of the cultural conflict between the Old and the New Worlds; one of the major themes which are found in the works of the great 19th century American novelist Henry James. He deals in his novels with a variety of cultural, social, and moral issues through stories of intercultural encounters between American and European characters. Thus, this paper studies one of his least appreciated novels, The Europeans (1878), to show that the greatness of the text lies in the aesthetic and semiotic power of its landscape which acts as an interactive medium for expressing emotions and functions as a process of signification conditioned by the American culture.

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