SOURCE: "Attitude and Illness in James' 'Daisy Miller'," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XIX, No. 1, 1969, pp. 51-60.

In the following essay, Houghton explores the role of illness in James's novella, maintaining that many Americans visiting Europe become ill in the story "not so much because of any objective circumstances in the new environment but as a result of attitudes the Americans take toward that environment."

Oscar Cargill's definition of James' "international novel" indicates how close James came in so many of his novels to presenting the psycho-physical experience we now refer to as culture shock. "If Turgenev had originated 'the international novel,' James was to perfect and more sharply define it. An 'international novel' is not simply a story of people living abroad, as in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, but it is a story of persons taken out of the familiar contexts of their own mores...