This 1996 book describes a new Henry James who, rather than being paraded as a beacon of high culture, actually expresses a nuanced understanding of, and engagement with, popular culture. Arguing against recent trends in critical studies which locate racial resistance in popular culture, Sara Blair uncovers this resistance within literature and high modernism. She analyses a variety of texts from early travel writing to The Princess Casamassima, The American Scene and The Tragic Muse, always setting the scene through descriptions of key events of the time such as Jack the Ripper's murders. Blair makes a powerful case for reading James with a sense of sustained contradiction and her project absorbingly argues for the historical and ongoing importance of literary texts and discourses to the study of culture and cultural value.

Henry James Today is a collection of seven essays focused on the relevance of Henry James’s work for an understanding of current problems. This volume includes studies of how James and such contemporaries as Mark Twain and the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis have influenced each other and modernist and postmodernist writers, such as Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Franzen, and Philip Roth. These traditional studies of literary influence are complemented by essays on Henry James and visual media (collage, painting, sculpture, architecture) and new media (digital social media and the digital humanities). Recognizing the significant cultural and technological changes since James lived and wrote, the contributors nonetheless focus on the historical and cultural continuities between James’s era and our own. Other contributors focus on innovative practices in James’s cultural era to understand how the modernist avant-garde anticipated social and aesthetic issues that are today central to our lives. The contributors represent a global spectrum of James Studies, and their diverse essays indicate James’s powerful influence on aesthetic and social issues. Brad Evans (Rutgers University), Ashley Barnes (Williams College), Harilaos Stecopoulos (University of Iowa), Harold Hellwig (Idaho State University), Geraldo Cáffaro (Universidade Federale de Minais Gerais, Brazil), John Carlos Rowe (University of Southern California), and Shawna Ross (Arizona State University) represent an exemplary cross-section of those scholars working on Henry James today.

Henry James and the “Aliens” intervenes substantially in current debates in James studies, most notably in the key areas of cultural studies, ethnic studies and queer studies. Focusing throughout on questions of identity, and most prominently on how the latter is given shape in the very form of the late style, the book finds that James’s response to the ethnic other can be grasped neither as an attempt to police, supervise and master the other, nor as a politics of non-identical surrender to that other. Instead, there is a continuum of identity—akin to the “criminal continuity” that James registers throughout the American scene—in which self and other, native and alien, subject and object adopt alternate roles of control and submission. Both are at times in possession of the American scene and possessed by that scene. Jamesian sexual identity, too, proves to be constantly reconstituted in transitive processes of signification that make it impossible to fix the “I” or the “other” within a fixed framework—be that framework a heterosexual or a homosexual one. The eroticism that strikingly informs the late James can therefore only be captured, if at all, under the rubric of the “queer.”

Examines the life and writings of Henry James including detailed synopses of his works, explanations of literary terms, biographies of friends and family, and social and historical influences.

An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.

Range and diversity are aims of Tracing Henry James, which brings together 28 essays by established and newer Henry James scholars from eight countries in North America, Europe and Asia. The essays are organized into an introductory section, a group of essays on Henry James’s shorter fiction, one on James’s longer fiction, one on The American Scene and James’s travel essays, one on James and criticism, and one on Henry James’s letters.

Rowe uses recent work on the oppressive treatment of gays, women and children in his analysis of Henry James, arguing that James mounts a critique of bourgeois values and lack of historical consciousness.

Henry James stands as one of the preeminent writers of the late 19th/early 20th century period; however, the world he wrote about has since disappeared. This collection of essays provides pedagogical assistance for several of his short stories--including "The Jolly Corner", "The Europeans" and "Travelling Companions"--and his most anthologized longer works. It is aimed at instructors who do not consider themselves experts on James' work. Each essay approaches a single work, offering a critical analysis as well as providing pedagogical suggestions for how to introduce both the work and the relevant social issues to students of the 21st century.

Tessa Hadley examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralizing frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. Hadley argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping to leave behind a way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the 1890s as explorations of how disabling and distorting ideals of women's goodness and purity were learned and perpetuated within English and American cultural processes. These explorations, Hadley argues, liberate James to write the great heterosexual love affairs of the late novels, with their emphasis on the power of pleasure and play: themes which are central to James's ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure class society.

In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, María del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernández, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.