...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...

...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...

...Ezra Dan Feldman Abstract The form and formlessness of histories, regions, races, ballads, fictions, lists, characters, and mountains are among the topics of concern in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days , and they pose a real challenge to conveying what this novel is like. Caroline Levine's Forms...

...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...

... 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...

...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...

...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...

... 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. P.E. Charvet Harmondsworth: Penguin...

...Naomi Milthorpe The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences...

...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...

...Henry W. Pickford Paperno Irina , “Who, What Am I?” Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self ( Ithaca : Cornell UP , 2014 ), pp. 229, cloth, $35.00 . Copyright © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 Tolstoy's lifelong quest to know and represent himself accurately and exhaustively...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...: that “self-moving substance which is Subject” in the “shape of money .” For such a reading, the novel is thus to be grasped by critical theory as expressive of what Henri Lefebvre describes as a “predominance of the abstract in modern art [that] accompanies the extension of … the unlimited power of money...

... of art photographers such as Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, who transposed bodies and even body parts into different scenes and visual narratives. Ironically, then, the very qualities that seemed to disqualify photography as an artistic medium (fragmentation and abstraction) turn out...

... the concupiscence of readers who turn the pages only to get to the end. The coach whose stages are compared to the breaks between chapters in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews becomes in Sterne's text the speeding post chaise, a new technology in the mid-eighteenth century, which carries Tristram in his flight from...

... novel form around the attractions and reactions that organized social and psychological life in his city. Victorian sciences—particularly the work of George Henry Lewes and Charles Darwin—were turning to “net-work” to describe the plastic processes underpinning biological life. Dickens's fiction used...