The Turn of the Century: Henry James in Millennial Fiction

The essay explores the proliferation, since 2001, of novels rewriting Henry James's life and works. It articulates the developments in biographical and appropriative literature that enabled these interventions, including the postmodern skepticism toward biography as empirical fact and the recognition that the biographical subject is an illusion constructed in discourse. It theorizes James's appeal for contemporary novelists, which lies in the gaps and absences in his life, ripe for novelistic elaboration, and in the contemporaneity of subject matter, innovations in perspective, and cultural cachet of his works. It also explores how these novelistic reimaginings interact with readers' varying foreknowledge.