Submitted To The Graduate School And College Of English In Partial Fulfillment Of The Requirements For The Degree Of Master Arts

Henry James is worldly famous for his various literary works including the novels as well as the literary criticism. Living in the transitional period between Realism and Modernism, James initiated his composition and expounds new theories on writing novel.The literary creation period of Henry James can primarily be divided into three periods: the well-known"international theme"time, when he concerned mostly the conflicts of the cultures and values between Europe and America; the transitional stage when he began to shift the core of the novel from description of the external world to the spiritual world of the characters; the final mature phase, when he persisted in the exploration of the inner world and reflect personage's life through realization and experience in observation, assuming his own role as a detached spectator and analyst of life. It is in this ultimate mature stage, when Henry James finished his acclaimed psychological and spiritual masterpiece, his"spiritual trilogy"—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl.The three later works of Henry James are widely considered as the most representative of his ideas in literary creation that novelist's task lies not in narrating a series of incidents and just displaying the behaviors of the characters, but in expressing out people's inherent spirit with the characters through the exploration of heart. It is a period when Henry James's literary creation was reaching to a mature and perfect stage. He not only put forward the theory of"centre of consciousness"creatively, but formed his own peculiar article style, which was smooth and exquisite, having the unique aesthetic appeals and kind of implicit humor.My thesis is an attempt to take a close look at Henry James's spiritual trilogy created in his mature phase and explore how he presented the inner world of the personages by means of change in visions and development of consciousness. The three of novels I aim to make an exploration are The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, which, in turn, forms three independent chapters of my thesis.The whole thesis consists of five parts. In introduction, I examine the spiritual context of Henry James, and its implications for his literary and critical theories. The age where James lived is the 19th century crisis of belief and his intimate connections of his families all carry profound implications for the treatment of experience in Henry's fiction. Chapter One explores The Ambassadors, a philosophical and complex text, to see how Jamesian hero undergoes the profound shift of values and further renounces the formerly required vision. Chapter Two looks at James's views on death from The Wings of the Dove, and his idea that the consciousness would reach beyond the material and can continue regardless of physical life. Consciousness is very central to Chapter Three. James has adopted various allusive and allegorical metaphors and images in his last complete work, The Golden Bowl, which serves to uncover the fact that it is not easy to define the truth and complete the consciousness, due the gap between the truth and the appearance, the representation and the perception. Finally comes the conclusion of my thesis. Henry James is not only a great novelist who is only good at describing the external world and the gentle tradition of the exquisite culture, but a master in exploring the inner world full of problems. Being a novelist and psychologist, he has a great mastery in representing the complexity of people's psychology and the consciousness to the human nature.