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영어

This paper proposes that Leon Edel’s biography, The Life of Henry James, follows James Boswell’s model of Life of Johnson in its attitude, while adopting the “New Biography” theory which Edel expounded in his life-long study of literary biography. Edel’s general attitude toward Henry James manifests similarities with the kind of conviction and admiration Boswell had toward Samuel Johnson and his work. Edel also explores James’s life with a psychoanalytic method as a way of getting deeper into the interior of the secretive writer. The Life of Henry James has acquired its status as a masterpiece through the power of Edel’s imagination with which the biographer portrays James as an agonized son and brother turning into the ‘Master.’ If the collaboration between Boswell and Johnson as biographer and subject has never been duplicated as some might point out, Edel’s biography certainly emulates the fame of the former with the excitement and art which only the best fiction can offer.