This comprehensive account of the writing life of Henry James aims at providing a critical overview of all his important writings, firmly set in two contexts: that of James's practical career as a novelist in America, England, and Europe; and that of the literary and intellectual climate of his time. By tracing the complex development of his career under such headings as 'American and Romantic', 'Victorian and Realist', 'Crisis and Experiment' and 'Master and Modernist', it gives a dynamic portrait, both factual and interpretative, of one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in the language, whose many-sided career began in the time of Thackeray and Dickens, and ended by ushering in the writings of Joyce and Woolf.

The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.

Henry James and the Abuse of the Past explores the complex uses to which James puts his oblique experience of the American Civil War. Why does James use and abuse the past by fabricating and distorting people and events in his autobiographical work? The study integrates four elements: history, the past and problems of narration and representation; the homoerotics of the Civil war tales and other soldiering fiction; a life-long pre-occupation with Shakespeare as a historical figure; and theories of time as they come under the pressure of trauma and war. This well-written, insightful and persuasive study is an important contribution to James scholarship and will be of interest to any students and scholars of James

Employing a wide range of interpretive and theoretical approaches, this collection brings together distinguished James scholars from four continents to elicit new and exciting readings of a diverse array of James’s fiction and non-fiction. Through their transformative acts, the essays investigate James’s life-long engagement with cities, places, and tourist sites; offer theoretically informed readings of his work’s textual richness; and explore his intricate involvement with social and cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, economics, friendship and hospitality, and visual culture. Arranged under rubrics which signal the complex interrelations of Henry James as a historical individual and of the works he authored with a web of social, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses, the contributions collected in this book make a convincing case for the ongoing productivity of James’s oeuvre when interrogated from new critical angles and, therefore, for its enduring centrality to the concerns of literary and cultural studies.

The importance of ghosts, and liminal experience in general, in the fiction of Henry James.

Writer Henry James (1843-1916) was born in America but preferred to live in Europe; he finally become a British subject near the end of his life. His status as a permanent outsider is responsible for the recurring themes in his writing dealing with European sophistication (decadence) compared to American lack of sophistication (or innocence). He is respected in modern times for his psychological insight, for being able to reveal his characters' deepest motivations. These 11 essays, along with an introduction and an afterword, examine James's work through the prism of the author's latest style. Topics the contributing authors address include the Henry James revival of the 1930s, three of James's male aesthetics, women in his works, literary forgery, and parallels with the career and views of Margaret Oliphant. Three essays delve into issues of representation in art and fiction, then three more explore decadence, identity and homosexuality.

What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.