From Tradition To Modernity

Henry James is a man who lived in an age of struggle between old and new values, his works can be divided into three periods. At fist, he inherited the realistic tradition, and innovated new methods by absorbing the ancestor's methods. He explored the method of narration and penetrated into characters' mind. What he pursued is not the reality of actions and details, but the reality of mind. He abandoned the omniscient story teller, and told the story in the view of a perspective character in the novel. In the middle and the later periods, he continued to innovate and finally arrived at mature. In the first period, his writing style is clear and straight, but he created "James1 later style" in his later works in order to reflect the character's consciousness, ,which is highly abstract. This thesis focuses on the evolvement of James's writing style following his creation career.This thesis has five parts, the fist deals with the James' literature phases, and use it to analysis his novels' development, the following three parts try to find James' different creation styles in different periods by analysing specific work and certain social background, and draw a conclusion that his novels totally has modernism styles on the later stage, and James is rather a modernism writer than a realism writer that commonly viewed. The last part is a summary.