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Henry James and Modern Moral Life (review)
- Common Knowledge
- Duke University Press
- Volume 8, Issue 3, Fall 2002
- pp. 550-551
- Review
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Rent from DeepDyveCommon Knowledge 8.3 (2002) 550-551
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Review
Henry James and Modern Moral Life
Robert Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 272 pp.
It is one of the pleasures, and also purposes, of James's work to launch its own continuation in discussion with friends, as if over coffee. This is the invitation Pippin's book extends. It seems odd that he feels the need to defend his avenue into James as a moral one, since this is so decidedly one of James's own first and last signposts. But Pippin clarifies how much James is writing in and about a historical moment when moral questions have, if not simply lost, then changed, [End Page 550] ground. Pippin's effort toward exploring how one is nonetheless to regain one's moral footing crosses philosophical with literary discourse, with the reciprocity he also argues to be the basis of a possible, Jamesian, modern moral life.
—Shira Wolosky
Shira Wolosky is professor of English and American studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a fellow of the Hartman Institute. She is the author of Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, Language Mysticism, and The Art of Poetry. Her volume on nineteenth-century poetry in the Cambridge History of American Literature is forthcoming.
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