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Adeline R. Tintner. The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research P, 1987. 412 pp. $49.95. Adeline R. Tintner. The Pop World of Henry James: From Fairy Tales to Science Fiction. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research P, 1989. 317 pp. $44.95. The Book World of Henry James and The Pop World of Henry James continue the work Adeline Tintner began in her earlier book, The Museum World of Henry James (1986), by describing James's use of literary works by other writers, much as The Museum World described James's use of the plastic and graphic arts to inspire and influence his work. While the three books bring together the astonishingly wide range of Tintner's years of reading and writing about Henry James, they provide much more than an appropriate capstone to her career; they also recall and emphasize for us the richness of James's own work. Tintner begins The Book World by culling quotations from James's nonfiction that testify to his deliberate preference for rewriting what he enjoyed reading. Through Tintner, James reminds us that "if a work of imagination, of fiction, interests me at all ... I always want to write it over in my own way, handle the subject from my own sense of it. That I always find a pleasure in. ... I can't speak more highly for any book, or at least for my interest in any. I take liberties with the greatest" (James, quoted in Tintner, xix). Tintner herself says that, throughout his career, James "was compelled for multiple reasons to redo the classic works of literature he had known since boyhood. Among them was the need to improve them and to revise them in his way, as well as the desire to induce the reader to participate in the immediate writing of the tale through recognition of the work drawn from the imagination of another" (xx). Taking James at his word, she has gracefully participated in his project. The Book World is arranged much as one might imagine arranging a traditional curriculum of studies in English literature, from undergraduate courses to dissertation: it begins with separate chapters discussing the two most influential writers in English, William Shakespeare and John Milton; then moves on to examine two literary periods significant for James, Romanticism and Aestheticism; continues by discussing the influence of national literatures, English, American, and European; and concludes with an extended period of intensive research on a particular, abiding influence, namely, the life and work of Honoré de Balzac. This organization lends itself well to suggesting the various ways that literary masters and mentors presented themselves to James throughout his career, both as sources for plot and surface structure in his early work and as highly nuanced allusions and evocations later. Some readers may be disappointed that Tintner has chosen to organize her book by the sources that James used rather than by the works in which those sources appeared. Such an organization might have more readily suggested how different sources play off one another as James orchestrates them into his own composition. However, Tintner is writing for an audience already familiar with James's work. Thus, her discussion of how a source wends its way through various stories and novels often focuses on the source rather than its destination and explains how James's use of a particular source changes over the years. The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 213-219 ©1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 214 The Henry James Review Other readers may find themselves frustrated that Tintner sometimes abruptly ends her discussion of the influence of a work and does not come back to a more general consideration of it at the end of a chapter. This fragmentation is true, for example, of the chapter on English novelists, a significant one that finds sources for several short stories and for The Portrait of a Lady in works by Jonathan Swift, George Meredith, and Robert Louis Stevenson. While the sources Tintner considers are indeed quite varied, they often need some kind of organizing discussion rather than episodic collection. Particularly disturbing is the ending of the chapter, which...

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