Focusing on James's last three completed novels – The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl – Maya Higashi Wakana shows how a microsociological approach to James's novels radically revises the widespread tradition of putting James's characters into historical and cultural contexts. Wakana begins with the premise that day-to-day living is inherently theatrical and thus duplicitous, and goes on to show that James's art relies significantly on his powerful sense of the agonizing and even dangerous complications of mundane face-to-face rituals that pervade his work. Centrally informed by social thinkers such as G. H. Mead and Erving Goffman, Wakana's study discloses the richness, complexity, and singularity of the interpersonal connections depicted in James's late novels. Persuasively argued, and rich in original close readings, her book makes an important contribution to James's studies and to theories of social interaction.

Both James’s life and his literary career might be figured as a double spiral rooted at the one end in the American soil and in romanticism, contracting in its middle on contact with France and French naturalism and expanding again into the Anglo-Saxon world and into the twentieth century. The spiral—which also suggests the artist’s indirect approach to reality—strikes me as an adequate symbol for Henry James. From Bramante’s ramp in the Vatican to F.L. Wright’s in the Guggenheim Museum it has always been the favourite shape of all those who claimed greater freedom for the artist, rejected the fixity of academic rules and were convinced that art, like the spirit of man, is capable of endless progress.

Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forbears about the purity of the child, depictions of children as monsters have held a tremendous fascination for film audiences for decades. Numerous social factors have influenced the popularity and longevity of the monster-child trope but its appeal is also rooted in the dual concepts of the child-like (innocent, angelic) and the childish (selfish, mischievous). This collection of fresh essays discusses the representation of monstrous children in popular cinema since the 1950s, with a focus on the relationship between monstrosity and "childness," a term whose implications the contributors explore.