Henry James

As Jonathan Freedman notes in his survey of James criticism in Henry James in Context (see section iii, below), Henry James now plays a cultural role analogous to that of Shakespeare, serving as an icon of literary value whose influence shapes not only contemporary fiction but also the professional practices of scholars, critics, and theorists. The continuing vitality of archival research is evidenced by Amy Tucker's book on James and his illustrators, as well as by Angus Wrenn's study of the novelist's debt to conservative French writers. Several of the articles in this year's special issue of the Henry James Review, on the author and women, likewise draw on unpublished or neglected primary sources. The central project of recent literary historians—defining James's place within the modernist movement—has been advanced by editor David McWhirter's important new anthology and by guest editor Glen MacLeod's issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal, devoted exclusively to the relationship between the novelist and the poet. For theorists James remains a key figure whose position is as debatable as the interpretations of his fiction. Does his focus on shifting human relations preclude the search for a moral or religious foundation? Or is he a precursor of today's philosophers and theologians trying, however tentatively, to rebuild a foundation?

i Editions, Letters, Biographical Studies

A text well designed for classroom use is Christopher Ricks's new edition of What Maisie Knew (Penguin). The volume includes an introduction detailing James's resistance to didactic and sentimental fiction (pp. xiii-xxvii) and a chronology by Philip Horne (pp. v-xii). James's most popular narrative, The Turn of the Screw, receives updated treatment in the third edition of Peter G. Beidler's volume in the Bedford series Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. New material includes a detailed account of revisions James made from the Collier's Weekly version to the New York edition, additional documents illustrating 19th-century representations of ghosts and governesses, and a psychoanalytic essay by Greg Zacharias, "'The Extraordinary Flight of Heroism the Occasion Demanded of Me': Fantasy and Confession in The Turn of the Screw" (pp. 320-32). Beidler has also edited The "Collier's Weekly" Version of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (Coffeetown). The Library of America has published the eleventh and final volume of its edition of James's complete fiction, Henry James: Novels 1903-1911: "The Ambassadors," "The Golden Bowl," "The Outcry," ed. Ross Posnock. An appendix reprints "The Married Son," James's chapter in the collaborative novel The Whole Family (1908). The volume concludes with a chronology of James's life and works, a brief essay on the sources of the texts, and notes on allusions and foreign phrases.

Oliver Herford's "The Roman Lotus: Digestion and Retrospect" (HJR 31: 54-60) links literal references in letters of the 1870s with metaphors in "the retrospective nonfiction of the fourth phase." Though James's "particular digestive failure" suggests "a general inability to assimilate his European experiences," William Wetmore Story and His Friends alludes to Alfred Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" in a way that enacts James's "conversion of the poem's hazards . . . into a healthful security."

The Henry James Review (HJR) special issue on the author and women (31, iii) comprises biographical essays as well as discussions of individual novels and tales. Sarah Wadsworth's "Henry James Rides Again" (pp. 218-31) describes James's early friendship with Alice Bartlett, an androgynous companion in "equestrian adventures" who inspired the travel sketch "Roman Rides" (1873). Rosella Mamoli Zorzi's "Private and Public Subjects in the Correspondence Between Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner" (pp. 232-38) outlines patterns in more than 100 letters written by James to Gardner between 1879 and 1914. A complementary essay, Meaghan Clarke's "The 'Triumph of Perception and Taste': Women, Exhibition Culture, and Henry James" (pp. 246-53), documents the author's interest in the expanding art world of London and Paris, where women played roles as spectators and sitters and sometimes as artists. James's reviews record the link between consumption and fashionability, as...