James: An Intertextual Study

ELT 36:2 1993 structed. Scattered throughout his argument are hints of his faith in reason: "here we can clearly see" (68); "logically enough" (131); "we can immediately see" (138); "[it] is only too evident" (168); "by now the philosophical argument should be clear at last" (185). This reader, for one, seldom sees that clearly. At bottom Loesberg, despite his methodology , seems to share Mill's faith in rationality. I do not. Opinions are not the necessary results of lines of argument: they are their starting points. Derrida's politics do not result from his methodology, nor, I suspect, do Loesberg's. I like the intelligence oÃ- Aestheticism and Deconstruction ; I agree with the shape of its argument. Moreover there are brilliant stretches in the book: its discussion of homophobia (187ff), for example, is superb. But Loesberg's defense of deconstruction and his claims for its political efficacy I find ultimately unconvincing. Robert Keefe University of Massachusetts, Amherst James: An Intertextual Study Adeline R. Tintner. The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. xxiv + 328 pp. $35.00 THE COSMOPOLITAN WORLD OF HENRY JAMES is the latest in a sequence of studies in which the author has set herself to chart in detail the cultural sources of James's fiction. Her earlier volumes—The Museum World of Henry James, The Book World of Henry James, and The Pop World of Henry James—deal respectively with James's use of the visual arts; of classic or canonical literature; and of traditional and popular culture and science fiction. This new book examines his response to "the worldly, cosmopolitan novels of his own time" and draws its examples from France, Italy and the German-speaking countries as well as England. Its thesis is that James's fiction exemplifies an evolution from what one might for convenience call the Daisy Miller type of innocent abroad, with a strong contrast between American freshness, energy and inexperience and European sophistication and worldliness, to "an American type that had become Europeanized like himself, a 'citizen of the world'—that is, an American, and specifically Jamesian, notion of an ideal cosmopolitanism." As the author points out, James's international theme has always been a favorite, perhaps the favorite, concern of his critics and commentators . Her argument is that in the course of James's career internation222 BOOK REVIEWS alism gives way to cosmopolitanism. A key text here is James's 1899 article The Present Literary Situation in France," which discusses Zola, Bourget, Barres and Anatole France and demonstrates his awareness of recent developments in European fiction. That essay appeared at the end of a decade in which, according to Tintner, James was much preoccupied with the theatre but was also writing stories such as "A Private Life" and "Collaboration" that enact "a kind of cosmopolitanism only possible to an American who has been reared and educated in Europe." "Only possible" may make us hesitate, but the author explains that whereas a European must always be a Frenchman, German, or whatever, "only an American"—perhaps one should, strictly, say "only a non-European"?—can aspire to be fully 'European" without the ties of nationalism. (James's work of this period should perhaps be required reading for the architects of the new Europe exactly one hundred years later.) The bulk of the book comprises a series of case-studies of particular debts, influences and analogies, and the author's characteristic though not invariable strategy is to consider the impact upon a specific Jamesian text of a book he is known to have read or a play he saw. Thus the opening chapter, on "English Cosmopolitanism," explores the relationship of The Sacred Fount to Ouida's A House Party and Max Beerbohm's The Happy Hypocrite" as well as the connection between James's 1900 story "Maud-Evelyn" and Henry Harland's The House of Eulalie," which James had just read. It also discusses in more general terms James's literary relationship with Wilde. Subsequent chapters are concerned with, for instance, earlier German cosmopolitanism (Goethe and Hoffmann), the cosmopolitanism of Daudet and Zola, French fin-desiècle fiction and theatre, and Gabriele D...