Sheldon M. Novick has written an extensive biographical introduction. This is complimented by an essay documenting James's friendships with younger men, which includes quotations from unpublished letters. Other subjects include the influence on James of the emergence of a specific concept of 'the homosexual' and James's reactions to the aesthetic movement; and there are close analyses of many of James's stories and novels, selected so that all of his career is represented.

Sheldon M. Novick has written an extensive biographical introduction. This is complimented by an essay documenting James's friendships with younger men, which includes quotations from unpublished letters. Other subjects include the influence on James of the emergence of a specific concept of 'the homosexual' and James's reactions to the aesthetic movement; and there are close analyses of many of James's stories and novels, selected so that all of his career is represented.

The romantic side of Henry James, revealed through his letters to young male friends

This provocative book argues that in his fiction Henry James was more canny about sexual identities, more focused on sexual pleasure, and more insistent on flouting heterosexual convention than has been acknowledged by his critics and biographers. Without leaping to the construction of a "gay" Henry James, whose writings aver a conscious sexual preference, the author demonstrates James's deep engagement with the construct of sexual "inversion," his familiarity with the tropes and traffic of the late-Victorian sexual underground, and his resistance to the cultural codes and institutions that disciplined social and private behavior. The volume aligns biographical and textual readings with specific topics in intellectual and cultural history, placing the novelist and his works within the key discursive frameworks that emerged during his lifetime: mental hygiene, sexology, psychiatry, and cultural anthropology. In reconsidering James's reputed celibacy and effeminacy, the author makes use of recent gender and queer theory, while remaining carefully attentive to the contemporary terms at James's disposal for understanding his own sexuality and gender identification. The author also elaborates the family dynamics that affected James's gender and professional identity conflicts, notably his turbulent relations with his brother William James, whose pathologizing of the "unhygienic" creative life conditioned his thinking about both sexuality and art. Extended discussions of four novels--Roderick Hudson, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, and The Wings of the Dove--underscore James's resistance to the disciplinary mechanisms that regulate homoerotic desire under the aegis of mental hygiene and sexual "responsibility." Understanding, with queer theory, that sublimation can be a form of pleasure in a non-heterosexual community, the book views James's erotic economy of artistic production--even as it increasingly emphasized self-discipline--as a means of circumventing the suppression of sexual nonconformity.

Henry James remained throughout his life focused on his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on younger boys and men, and John R. Bradley illustrates how it is in the context of such narcissism that James consistently dealt with male desire in his fiction. He also traces a more subtle but related trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist gay discourse, which in turn is shown to have been paralleled by a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical book, which covers the whole of James's career, will quickly be recognized as a defining text in this emerging field of James studies.

What can we know of the private lives of early British sovereigns? Through the unusually large number of letters that survive from King James VI of Scotland/James I of England (1566-1625), we can know a great deal. Using original letters, primarily from the British Library and the National Library of Scotland, David Bergeron creatively argues that James' correspondence with certain men in his court constitutes a gospel of homoerotic desire. Bergeron grounds his provocative study on an examination of the tradition of letter writing during the Renaissance and draws a connection between homosexual desire and letter writing during that historical period. King James, commissioner of the Bible translation that bears his name, corresponded with three principal male favorites—Esmé Stuart (Lennox), Robert Carr (Somerset), and George Villiers (Buckingham). Esmé Stuart, James' older French cousin, arrived in Scotland in 1579 and became an intimate adviser and friend to the adolescent king. Though Esmé was eventually forced into exile by Scottish nobles, his letters to James survive, as does James' hauntingly allegorical poem Phoenix. The king's close relationship with Carr began in 1607. James' letters to Carr reveal remarkable outbursts of sexual frustration and passion. A large collection of letters exchanged between James and Buckingham in the 1620s provides the clearest evidence for James' homoerotic desires. During a protracted separation in 1623, letters between the two raced back and forth. These artful, self-conscious letters explore themes of absence, the pleasure of letters, and a preoccupation with the body. Familial and sexual terms become wonderfully intertwined, as when James greets Buckingham as "my sweet child and wife." King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire presents a modern-spelling edition of seventy-five letters exchanged between Buckingham and James. Across the centuries, commentators have condemned the letters as indecent or repulsive. Bergeron argues that on the contrary they reveal an inward desire of king and subject in a mutual exchange of love.

Using insights from feminist studies, men's studies, and gay and queer studies, Leland Person examines Henry James's subversion of male identity and the challenges he poses to conventional constructs of heterosexual masculinity. Sexual and gender categories proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Person argues that James exploited the taxonomic confusion of the times to experiment with alternative sexual and gender identities. In contrast to scholars who have tried to give a single label to James's sexuality, Person argues that establishing James's gender and sexual identity is less important than examining the novelist's shaping of male characters and his richly metaphorical language as an experiment in gender and sexual theorizing. Just as an author's creations can be animated by his or her own sexuality, Person contends, James's sexuality may be most usefully understood as something primarily aesthetic and textual. As Person shows in chapters devoted to some of this author's best-known novels—Roderick Hudson, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl—James conducts a series of experiments in gender/sexual construction and deconstruction. He delights in positioning his male characters so that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple. Ultimately, he keeps male identity in suspense by pluralizing male subjectivity.

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.

First application of 'queer theory' to Henry James; provides a radical and original interpretation of all his writings.