Revisionism for Modernizing Experience in The Golden Bowl: A New-historical Perspective

The present article intends to show how the bi-partite structure of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl makes it possible for the author to recycle its discourse through a strategy of revisionism. With the emergence of new theories and critical perspectives in the humanities of the 1970s and after, it seems that this strategy of creative writing has been considerably theorized also. A hypothesis behind the insertion of theory and practice here is that revising the previous literatures has come to be strategic for modernizing experience and creating new knowledge. For example, mainly based on Foucault’s contributions to literature, new historicism takes history and literature as interconnected, while it takes their interconnection as implying that the revisionism of the bygone periods’ literatures is a way for revivifying the historical situations of their production. In a literary work, the author-text-reader connections on one side, and the relation between power and literature on other side are features on which a new historicist focuses for historicizing the work. The present study also attempts to provide James’s reader with some theories and examples of revisionism in his novel for restructuring its discourse and making it applicable to the present time conditions