... of the kind of specialized cultural attention that childhood had become over a century earlier. One place where we can see this change happen is the work of Henry James. The adult is not a fact of nature that James exploits but rather an idea that he helps to construct, both through the way he talks about...

...Matthew Sussman For many readers, “stupidity” in Henry James signifies mental slowness, poor taste, or even moral delinquency. However, James also conceived of stupidity as a positive virtue because it promises to deliver the individual from the “ordeal of consciousness” associated...

...Victoria Coulson Abstract This article begins with critics’ hostility toward Gilbert Osmond, the notorious villain of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881). It identifies this tradition as a response to Osmond's identity as a trans woman and to the mode of embodiment that Osmond demonstrates...

... . Armstrong , Paul B. “Reading James’s Prefaces and Reading James.” Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship . Ed. David McWhirter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995 . 125 –37. Baudelaire , Charles . “The Painter of Modern Life.” Selected Writings on Art and Literature . Trans...

...Emily Zubernis What is a minimalist novel? This essay approaches the question through readings of Henry James, a writer notorious for the complexity of his prose style. James's writing is never simple and rarely brief, of course, but it is often remarkably unproductive. Indeed, the very complexity...

...Fabio L. Vericat Abstract This essay proposes to consider how The American (1875) is symptomatic of Henry James's elocutionary insecurities about the demands the European nineteenth-century novel placed on the authorial voice—crucially aggravated by the American stutter that accompanied the young...

...Katherine Kruger Abstract By foregrounding the difficulties with reading the child, Henry James's What Maisie Knew reconfigures the relationship between simplicity, transparency, and opacity to create reparative “styles of knowing” in the novel. This article proposes that the difficulty...

...Janina Levin Abstract Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl 's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor...

...Samuel Cross This essay closely examines Henry James's notion of “tact”—caution in what one says about others—treating the idea from an ethical perspective. I trace James's ethics of tact through his late The Wings of the Dove , arguing that the author holds himself to certain stringent standards...

...Elizabeth Brogden This article argues that the protagonist of Henry James's first work of psychological realism, The Portrait of a Lady (1881), has an oblique relationship to its plot. In this novel, James constructs Isabel's subjectivity (her feeling, apperception, and psychological depth...

...Kent Puckett Henry James's The Princess Casamassima is, among other things, a novel about becoming a terrorist. What kind of past suits one to a terrorist's work? What makes this especially interesting is the fact that the novel's main character, Hyacinth Robinson, is offered as both the most...

...Caroline Wilkinson Abstract This article radically reframes Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady in relation to the Underground Railroad, the transatlantic slave trade, US slavery, and racial housing segregation. Focusing on the house in Albany, New York, where Isabel Archer stays in the 1850s...

...Ivan Kreilkamp Henry James famously remarked of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd that “[e]verything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.” This comment is generally taken as a simple putdown, but it can also...

... text and audience that characterizes a mass reading public. Yet in Eliot this turn toward an expansive, inclusive form of address is also linked to an increasingly rarefied style. The essay concludes by examining how the aesthetically rarefied Henry James and the populist best seller Marie Corelli...

...Chloë Kitzinger Abstract This article argues that the early twentieth-century Dostoevsky criticism of Russian Symbolist thinkers, roughly contemporaneous with Henry James's New York Edition prefaces, laid the foundation for an alternative line of novel theory, engaged not with the novel's claim...

.... The essay places the novel into a broader philosophical conversation with the works of William James, Henry Adams, and Karl Marx and suggests new understandings of the body-subject (James), American imperial management (Adams), and commodity fetishism (Marx). So contextualized, we see Lily's self-managerial...

..., 1995 . Blackall , Jean Frantz . Jamesian Ambiguity and The Sacred Fount . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1965 . Blackmur , R.P. “The Sacred Fount.” 1942. Studies in Henry James . New York: New Directions, 1983 . 45 –68. Cameron , Sharon . Thinking in Henry James . Chicago: U...

...THEO DAVIS Copyright © Novel Corp. 2001 2001 Works Cited Anderson , Quentin . The Imperial Self: An Essay in Literary and Cultural History . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 . Bell , Millicent . Meaning in Henry James . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991 . Bersani , Leo...

...Stuart Burrows KENDALL JOHNSON, Henry James and the Visual (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 262, cloth, $100.00. © 2010 by Novel, Inc. 2010 Work Cited Bersani , Leo . A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature . New York: Columbia UP, 1984...

..., James's portrait of a “man of imagination” whose education consists in imagining the experiences of others is not a deviation from the tradition of the bildungsroman but a realization of one of the genre's originary possibilities. Copyright © 2020 John Attridge 2020 Henry James J. W. Goethe...