This early work by Henry James was originally published in 1898 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. One of thirteen children, James had an unorthodox early education, switching between schools, private tutors and private reading.. James published his first story, 'A Tragedy of Error', in the Continental Monthly in 1864, when he was twenty years old. In 1876, he emigrated to London, where he remained for the vast majority of the rest of his life, becoming a British citizen in 1915. From this point on, he was a hugely prolific author, eventually producing twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories and novellas, as well as literary criticism, plays and travelogues. Amongst James's most famous works are The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), The Bostonians (1886), and one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, The Turn of the Screw (1898). We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

An expertly edited, fine edition of James's stories from the end of his career collects thirty-one tales, including the fantasies "The Great Good Place" and "The Jolly Corner," along with "The Beast in the Jungle."

Education of the Senses, the first book of Peter Gay's projected multi-volume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I, re-examines the sexual behavior and attitudes of Victorians

Henry James criticized the impressionism that was revolutionizing French painting and fiction. He satirized the British aesthetic movement whose keystone was impressionist criticism. So why, time and again in important parts of his literary work, did James use the word 'impression'? Henry James and the Art of Impressions argues that James tried to wrest the impression from the impressionists and to recast it in his own art of the novel. Interdisciplinary in its range, philosophical and literary in its focus, the book shows the place of James's work within the wider cultural history of impressionism. It draws on painting, philosophy, psychology, literature, and critical theory to examine James's art criticism, early literary criticism, travel writing, reflections on his own fiction, and the three great novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. It shows how the language of impressions enables James to represent the most intense moments of consciousness of his characters. It argues that the Jamesian impression is best understood as a family of related ideas bound together by James's attempt to reconcile the novel's value as a mimetic form with its value as a transformative creative activity.

Romance was a theme that ran through much of Northrop Frye's corpus, and his notebooks and typed notes on the subject are plentiful. This unpublished material, written between 1944 and 1989, traces a remarkable re-evaluation in his thinking over the course of time. As a young scholar, Frye insisted that romance was an expression of cultural decadence; however, in his later years, he thought of it as "the structural core of all fiction." The unpublished material Michael Dolzani has gathered for Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance shows how the pattern and conventions of romance inform the writing of history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. While Frye is best known for his writing on myth and biblical scholarship, he himself eventually conceived of romance as the true and equal contrary to myth and scripture, a "secular scripture" whose message is de te fabula, "this story is about you." Given the current popular revival of romance in fiction and film, the appearance of Frye's unpublished work on romance is of profound importance.

This study of Henry James's biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Wetmore Story offers an argument that he deserves greater recognition for his contributions to the development of biography, based on his implicit theory of biography, found in his critical commentary and on these two complicated and ultimately artistically innovative performances in the genre. Although James maintained an ambivalent relationship to the art of biography, in his reviews, criticism, letters and fiction, he wrote about biography from a core of aesthetic conviction that constitutes an informal poetics. It is necessary thus to scrutinize the ways in which James's theoretical convictions, particularly his insistence on artistic unity, fail him when he writes two biographies himself. Both Hawthorne (1879) and William Wetmore Story and His Friends(1903) fail to cohere in the way traditional biographies achieve unity. Neither work has at its center a dynamic and fully dimensional apprehension of the biographical subject. Instead James violates one of his own essential biographical tenets. He usurps his subject and places himself at the center of what should be a narrative of his subject's life. The results fall short of fully achieved biography, but they do not fall short of literary interest. In order to write these books according to his own genius, James had to reinvent the form. They are rife with innovations, chief among them his great experimentation with narrative point of view, here brought to bear on biography. This concept and others survey the terrain for the important biographical practitioners and theorists who follow him. For this reason, a special place must be found for James in pantheon of experimental biographers.

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. One of James's strangest works, The Sacred Fount, explores ideas of sexual desire and power in an English country house setting. The novel aroused considerable critical bewilderment and hostility on its original publication in 1901 but was retrieved by a subsequent generation of critics who found its ambiguity and stylistic elaboration an instance of James's 'mastery' and an early example of literary modernism. This is the first critical edition of James' landmark text and is supported by a full critical apparatus including introduction, notes, glossary, textual variants and bibliography. The volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars and advanced students of Henry James, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American fiction and literature.

One of the subjects of deepest and most enduring interest to Henry James was the creative experience of writers and critics. This study examines James's fictions about this experience, placing them within the context of James's critical work and enabling the reader to see this body of work as James himself did: as a coherent, extended portrayal of the creative experience of the writer-critic.