James after 1900

BOOK REVIEWS life, and a multitude of historical events. While no one study can do full justice to the complexity of West's ideology, Paradoxical Feminism makes an important beginning to this formidable undertaking. Lynette Felber Indiana-Purdue University, Fort Wayne James after 1900 Adeline R. Tintner. The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work after 1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. 252 pp. $49.95 THE APPEARANCE of a new work by Adeline Tintner is a welcome event for students of Henry James and of American literature. Collectively , her books comprise a monumental study of the intertextual and cultural backgrounds and afterlives of James's works. The Museum World of Henry James (1986) offered an exhaustive study of art and artists in James's corpus; The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics (1987) surveyed James's readings in French, English and American literature; The Pop World of Henry James: From Fairy Tales to Science Fiction (1989) studied James's incorporation of a range of popular cultural materials; and The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study (1991) examined James's responses to English, French, and German fin-de-siècle novels, theater, and opera. Reversing the usual direction of Tinter's analysis, Henry James's Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction ( 1998) investigated James's presence in the works of others, from portrait and parody to intertextuality. A treasure trove for those interested in tracing Jamesian "influence," this volume discovered Jamesian intertexts in writers as different as Gertrude Stein, Philip Roth, and Judith Kranz. This new volume takes up James's writings after the New York Edition of 1907-1909, a relatively neglected body of work that is finally receiving the critical attention it merits. Taking as her principal texts The American Scene, the autobiography, the unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, the revisions for the New York Edition, and the New York tales of 1906-1909, Tintner addresses the "modernist themes that preoccupied Henry James as he entered the new century"—among them technology , the "romance of finance," and the emergent phenomenon of art collecting—as well as James's evolving views of time, sexuality, and the war. 213 ELT 45 : 2 2002 Tintner's first chapter engages the repercussions of James's eighteen-month 1904-1905 American tour. Arguing that James's return to the U.S. "revitalized his review of his whole oeuvre," she examines the imprint on the late writings of his thought about contemporary architecture , the new hotel culture, and the 1907 financial panic. John Pierpont Morgan, she suggests, figures allusively in several late texts, providing a partial prototype for Winch in "A Round of Visits"; and the "portrait by a great modern master" referred to in "The Jolly Corner" may allude not to a John Singer Sargent portrait, as previously assumed, but to Edward Steichen's 1903 photograph of Morgan. As elsewhere in her work, Tintner proves a talented literary detective: she proposes that the portrait of Aurora Coyne in The Sense of the Past is based on Titian's portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, and that James's prose style in The American Scene was influenced by his 1904 viewing of the Pope collection of Impressionist paintings in Farmington, Connecticut. A brief second chapter discovers cameos of James's friends in a range of characters in the late works. Simone de Peruzzi de Medici, the husband of Edith Story—whose father, the sculptor William Wetmore Story, is the subject of James's 1903 biography—is proposed as the model for Prince Amerigo of The Golden Bowl. As often with Tintner's work, the tracing of such sources may not always lead to clear conclusions: it is difficult to see that significant light is shed on The Golden Bowl by the possibility that James may have had Simone de Peruzzi de Medici in mind in the characterization of Amerigo. On the other hand, it is impossible not to be entertained by the suggestion that Fanny Assingham's name may have been inspired by that of Fanny Sitwell, the wife of Sir Sidney Colvin (himself proposed as the model for Mr. Crichton, the British...