Reviewed by: Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity: Commercial Cosmopolitanism by June Hee Chung Greg Zacharias June Hee Chung. Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity: Commercial Cosmopolitanism. Routledge, 2019. xii and 246 pp. $160 (hardback). It's fair to say that while attention to Henry James as a professional writer has never been absent, the scholarly turn from Leon Edel's representation of Henry-James-as-Master to that of James as a professional author working to build his career can be marked from Marcia Jacobson's Henry James and the Mass Market (1983) [End Page E-16] and, especially, Michael Anesko's "Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986). At the same time, while that turn changed the way we think of and understand James and his fiction, attention to James's narrative strategies, innovations, borrowings, and changes—in short the art of his fiction—has never flagged. In general, though, the two paths in Henry James studies—James as professional and James as artist—have not overlapped extensively, until now. June Hee Chung's Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity: Commercial Cosmopolitanism succeeds at showing how Henry James used his awareness of both the commercial and the aesthetic realms together as a basis of his fiction. Chung's Henry James, then, is a new master, one whose feet are planted firmly in the world of liberal capitalism and whose imagination and artistic skill are strong enough to use what he sees and knows of that experience as the basis of his innovative work as a fiction writer, autobiographer, and critic. The opening of chapter 4, "Getting the Picture: American Corporate Advertising and the Rise of a Cosmopolitan Visual Culture in The Ambassadors" offers a good summary of Chung's book: It may be counterintuitive to assert that Henry James, the esteemed high stylist, was inspired by the commercial arts. Yet James considered advertising a sufficiently complex art, with techniques that rivaled, rather than simply imitated, those deployed in fine-art forms, such as painting and literature. Incorporating developments in American advertising into his late writing style, James both exploited and helped give credibility to an emerging business culture that increasingly relied on pictorial representation. Eventually, participants in both a cosmopolitan literary modernism as well as postmodernism would inherit James's adaptation to mass culture. (121) The preceding passage is representative of the book not only for its emphasis on James's writing but, equally important, for its incorporation of James's awareness of contemporary aesthetics and economics and also for the way James represented that awareness in his fiction and non-fiction. Chung's study of the meaning and significance of James's representation of contemporary aesthetics and economics, which she names "commercial cosmopolitanism," distinguishes her work in Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity. The way that Chung understands James's writing affiliates her book with earlier studies such as Anesko's "Friction with the Market, Jonathan Freedman's Professions of Taste, David McWhirter's Henry James's New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform, Emily Coit's "Henry James's Dramas of Cultivation," and my "Liberal London, Home, and Henry James's Letters from the Later 1870s," all of which recognize James's engagement with and awareness of the wider business world. What's new and important in Chung's book is the breadth and depth of that recognition. Chung develops Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity through an Introduction that explains the book's key concepts and six chapters and an epilogue that survey James's fiction: early work from the 1870s and The Portrait of a Lady (chapter 1); "The Death of the Lion" and "The Papers" (chapter 2); "Flickerbridge" and "The Velvet Glove" (chapter 3); The Ambassadors (chapter 4); Summersoft and The Wings of the Dove (chapter 5); The Golden Bowl (chapter 6); and The Ivory Tower, The American Scene, and The Outcry (epilogue). In addition to fiction, Chung [End Page E-17] discusses published and unpublished letters and a range of familiar (e.g., "The Art of...

“Idiosyncratic” could be a part of the definition of “best” when it comes to scholarly or critical monographs because they are always expressions of an individual mind that cannot be duplicated by others. In Henry James studies, nobody can write or teach J. Hillis Miller’s way other than J. Hillis Miller. Only Eric Savoy can read, write, and teach like Eric Savoy. Only Sharon Cameron can read and think and write what Cameron reads, thinks, and writes. This holds too for great readers and teachers of James whose names we know, such as Dorothea Krook, F. O. Matthiessen, and R. P. Blackmur, but whose work many of us have forgotten. Lynda Zwinger’s Telling in Henry James is likewise superb as well as idiosyncratic. Zwinger opens the book with an overview of how her way of reading differs from others. But for me, idiosyncratic as it is, the Telling in Henry James is rarely anything if not inspired and exciting. While a sentence here and a paragraph there might engage less than one before, the book is not easy to put down. Zwinger’s main emphases about James’s fiction – and his nonfiction as well, I believe – cannot, must not, be forgotten. Following her “Introduction,” in which she overviews her approach to reading James, Zwinger organizes Telling in Henry James in six chapters. All of the chapters develop the main point about the fiction that James’s stylistic oddness, excesses, extras, and “dirt” (Zwinger’s term) engage readers in the experience itself of reading fiction, and also mark James’s art as a fiction writer. For if, as James contends in “The Art of Fiction,” the literary artist is the one on whom nothing is lost, then the pages of fiction produced by that artist must contain, one way or another, all that had been captured. Zwinger reminds us that for James “[f]iction is the art of losing nothing... and particles of reality, a congeries of miscellaneous detritus, are suspended in the web of experience” (). Telling in Henry James, then, succeeds at teaching James’s “theory not of fiction, but of the art that is fiction” (). James’s fiction for Zwinger is not about representing the actual world, but in creating an artful experience of reading the novel itself. The experience of the fiction is what happens when readers find themselves “caught” in James’s “web” of experience. Thus in the spiderweb passage in “The Art of Fiction,”

Reviewed by: Writing Back: American Expatriates’ Narratives of Return by Susan Winnett Greg Zacharias Susan Winnett. Writing Back: American Expatriates’ Narratives of Return. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. xi + 285 pp. $63.00. (Hardback). Writing Back is very easy to admire. It’s only a bit little less easy to like. Writing Back is easy to admire for Susan Winnett’s thinking about and writing on four narratives of return, in which Winnett locates the “‘great difference’ that both separates and mutually constitutes America and the returning expatriate” (3). The four narratives are: Henry James’s The American Scene, in which Winnett shows that “[h]omecoming … foils the neat ratio between distance and perspective, on the one hand, and familiarity and affection, on the other” (3); Harold E. Stearns’s [End Page E-4] The Street I Know, which “opens up the possibility of a critical commentary on not only the canonical version of the expatriate experience of the 1920s but also the American coming-of-age that is often taken to be its direct result” (114); Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, in which Cowley, establishing a standard for other authors of lost-generation memoirs, “paint[ed] a portrait of literary America that would resemble the face that Cowley saw when he looked in the mirror” (169); and Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, in which Stein “narrates her return to America as a self-described ‘celebrity’ such that the ‘singular,’ ‘queer’ American becomes the representative American” (205). A concluding chapter, “Postscript,” reiterates key points made earlier and works to pull together the book’s four main chapters. Winnett’s chapter on Henry James and The American Scene is one of the two best in the book. Virtually each part of the chapter offers fresh insight and thus ways for reading not only The American Scene but James’s representational strategy overall, as well as James’s way of thinking about himself. Key to Winnett’s strategy is her extending the study of The American Scene to other James narratives of return, such as The Europeans, “The Jolly Corner,” and passages from reviews, letters, and James’s notebooks and journals. But it’s not the incorporation of these texts that distinguishes the chapter the most. After all, one could comb through James’s writings and select passages that should appear in a book on the narratives of return. But what distinguishes the chapter on The American Scene most is the reading/interpretive strategy Winnett develops and employs. Winnett’s strategy is surprising and rich in the ways it can/could be used and produces readings in this chapter that are deeply engaging, even if one reads the texts/passages analyzed another way. Winnett’s reading strategy is captured in these words on The American Scene: Yet The American Scene is consummately a record of his [James’s] attempts—and failures—to see, and more particularly, to transcribe the American he confronts and of the corresponding difficulty of making the definitive statement that critics seem to be seeking. I’ll even go so far as to claim that James’s attitude toward anything in America is first and foremost a matter of its representability, or rather, of his ability or inability to represent it. This representability, in turn, depends upon his ability to frame the phenomena he encounters, that is, to place them within a context that renders intelligible what would otherwise seem random or arbitrary. … Translated into The American Scene’s discourse of representation: instead of the frame determining the term of coherence of the painting, the contents determine the frame; instead of the force of the past determining the present, the present determines the extent to which the past is permitted to have any force at all. (48–49, 58) The resistance of the United States to Jamesian representation whenever American forms do not lend themselves to James’s narrative logic does not come without a cost. And that cost is significant: While James is able to infuse drama into his encounter with America, his attempt to penetrate “behind and beyond” its self-satisfied surface in order to discern and represent what “it would mean to be as...

Henry James’s relocation from Paris to London in December 1876 can be explained best not by failures in Paris, but by the opportunities he saw offered by London’s liberalism, which was congenial both to James’s ambition as a professional writer and also to his particular social interests. The Reform Club, where the social and professional overlapped, not only served as James’s social and professional base in London during those years. It stood for him as a symbol of London’s appeal as well as its satisfaction. The Reform Club was for him “a deep local attachment.”

The Expanding Henry James Archive Greg Zacharias Peter G. Beidler , ed. The Collier's Weekly Version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Seattle: Coffeetown, 2010. 235 pp. $16.95 (paperback). Amy Tucker . The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. 275 pp. $60.00 (hardcover). Ellen E. Rand . Dear Females. N.p.: Ellen E. Rand, 2009. 138 pp. $80.00 (paperback). Jacques Derrida feared the day when tens of thousands of pages of his unpublished work, his "remains," might be inaccessible or ignored in the "archive." When that happened, J. Hillis Miller tells us, Derrida thought that he would be forgotten and he would, in effect, die. Miller gives a witness's account: "When Derrida saw his catalogued manuscripts in the [University of California] Irvine library, neatly and professionally stored in long rows of gray cardboard file boxes, he said, 'They look like so many tombstones!'" (80; see also Derrida, Archive). Perhaps this fear is one explanation for Derrida's way of conceptualizing the archive, which not only holds work contained in it but also possesses the mechanism for shutting away anything it contains so that it (and the person who produced it) can be forgotten. Perhaps such a conception of the archive informed or was related to Derrida's idea for "the university without condition," where, by allowing all ideas to live on an equal footing, the [End Page 85] "university" enables them to remain alive rather than being boxed away and forgotten, effectively killed by the very institution that sought to preserve them (Derrida, "Future"). The Henry James archive may be in the process of transformation from the one that Derrida feared to the one that he promoted. James understood at least in part the importance of encouraging an open archive like Derrida's university without condition, since "[a]rt lives upon discussion, . . . upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints" (EL 44-45). Just so, James's reputation and status have widened and deepened as the borders of James Studies continue to extend far beyond where they stood fifty or even twenty years ago. Thus the more territory James Studies covers, the wider the archive becomes. As Michael Anesko writes of the "recuperation of lost material" (xi), "[l]iterary scholarship in our own time calls more and more for the enlargement of perspective and the necessity for adapting our reading practices to dismantle the narrower limits of nationalist traditions" (xii). Evidence of that enlargement and adaptation also can be seen in Peter Beidler's The Collier's Weekly Version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Amy Tucker's The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution, and Ellen E. Rand's Dear Females. That only Tucker's book was published by a traditional academic press is a significant feature of the James archive. The publication of important work on James by Beidler and Rand through a trade publisher (Coffeetown Press) and a self-publishing venture, signals the openness and growth in the James archive. Supplementing the tendency through most of the twentieth century to privilege critical/"final intention" editions published long after James's death at the expense of texts published during James's lifetime, Beidler's edition of "The Turn of the Screw" works to bring readers closer to the illustrated serial from Collier's Weekly. This is a reading experience that had been, until Beidler's book, virtually buried for more than a century. The recovery of the serialized and illustrated version provides insight to James's readership and to the nature of his professional life. Paul Eggert's demonstration of the importance of the reading context, including how, when, and where a text is read, in the determination of meaning, is only one way to think about the significance in favor of Beidler's edition (7-10). Beidler's useful introduction helps readers apprehend the reading expectations and practices of those who might have opened Collier's in 1898. At the same time, it strives (and succeeds in many ways) to find the delicate point where the needs of first-time student readers meet those of...

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Visual Greg Zacharias Henry James and the Visual. By Kendall Johnson. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Henry James's comment that he owed any advantage gained from his visit to Florida to "the rightly averted, and the rightly-directed eye" is of a piece with Kendall Johnson's important study of Henry James and the Visual (letter to Witter Bynner, 17 February 1905). For at the foundation of James's strategy as a novelist and critic is the relation of seeing to thinking and knowing. This relation engages Kendall Johnson in terms of the discourse and representational strategies of the picturesque. As a result, Johnson's study explains an important element of James's narrative style and also puts readers in contact with the nineteenth-century discourse of the picturesque. [End Page 176] Johnson distinguishes "visual" from "vision" in order to "emphasize sight as a process that is allusive and elusive in establishing meaning within and between social contexts" (6). Crucial for Johnson in the picturesque are human figures because they organize the narrative logic of any scene. James's invocation of the picturesque signals "moments when the pride of his characters balances precariously on their management of insecurities regarding how to recognize, classify, and, ultimately, respect national identity in the international marketplace" (9). Thus the picturesque supplies a way for understanding "the role of visual language in representing types of national culture, and, more broadly, in conceptualizing 'culture' as the kernel of national cohesiveness" (4). Following the "Introduction," Johnson organizes Henry James and the Visual via five chapters and an "Epilogue." "Classifying Donatello: the visual aesthetics of American exceptionalism" models Johnson's strategy for showing "how visual aesthetics arbitrate national identity" (28). "A 'dark spot' in the picturesque: the aesthetics of polygenism in 'A Landscape-Painter'" illustrates James's intervention in the discourse of the picturesque. "Rules of engagement: the arch-romance of visual culture in The American" explains how "[t]he racial terms of the novel's cultural categories […] invite us to consider the novel's generic confusion as related to broader, contemporaneous scientific debates regarding the definition of 'culture' as a category of identity that could be displayed as a collection of things at international exhibitions" (90). "The scarlet feather: racial phantasmagoria in What Maisie Knew" attends centrally to the representation of the "'brown lady,'" an "American Countess" (123), which "fans ambiguity of racial type at the very intersection of British interests in India, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North America" (125) and "call[s] attention to the ways stereotypes of Indians fit into the international network of race that James sensationalizes" (126). "Pullman's progress: the politics of the picturesque in The American Scene" investigates James's use of the urban picturesque and distinguishes James's "picturesque eye" (160) from those of his contemporaries and also from those, such as Emerson's, whose example established the picturesque mode in the generation before James's. In this chapter, Johnson recognizes meaning in James's "failure to build a national scene," which "dramatizes the social effect of feeling one's cultural authority dissipate" (177). "Epilogue: America seen" provides an overview of how Fanny Kemble's "visual methods" in A Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 "influenced [James's] engagement with the crisis of slavery and its civil legacy" (190). One gap in the book has to do with a nuanced discussion of both particular rhetorical situations James engages that probably affected the deployment of the picturesque and his deployment of indirect discourse, through which a narrator / narrative persona reports a character's vision of the picturesque. That is, all passages of the picturesque aren't equally "James's," at least in any straightforward way. Nonetheless, Henry James and the Visual is well worth reading for anyone interested in understanding the powerful representational effect and meaning of the picturesque during the nineteenth century and, especially, for learning how that mode was used and complicated by Henry James. Greg Zacharias Center for Henry James Studies. Creighton University. Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Reviewed by: The Reception of Henry James in Europe Greg Zacharias Annick Duperray, ed. The Reception of Henry James in Europe. New York: Continuum, 2006. xlviii + 379 pp. $250.00 (hardcover). The depth and breadth of the reception of Henry James in advertising, film and television, the classroom, the scholarly community, and among other fiction writers in North America and the United Kingdom since Hound and Horn 7 (1934), at least, are not news. At the same time, The Reception of Henry James in Europe, which demonstrates clearly that James has been actively received in Europe during this period, is probably not so well known and thus generates discussion. As an important part of that discussion, this volume adds significant detail to the “broad transnational picture” (260) of Henry James in the past and suggests some outlines to come. It also helps to explain why some of the best work in James studies is now being done by scholars outside the United States, Canada, and the U.K. Annick Duperray brings together essays from seventeen established and younger Jamesians from across Europe, who take up many crucial aspects of the reception [End Page 301] of James’s writing. Three other contributors are from the U.K. and one is from the U.S. Thus Duperray summarizes the aims of the volume, which “examines the ways in which . . . [James has] been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed on the continent of Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts” (viii). Most of the essays follow a similar format by surveying relevant translations and translators, M.A. theses, Ph.D. dissertations, important reviewers, cultural and literary exchanges (such as F. O. Matthiessen’s visit to Charles University in Prague in 1947), pedagogical traditions, and similarities between the Jamesian style and that of particular European writers. Especially interesting to me were the open and frank discussions (short though they had to be) of the relation of politics and government to the promotion or suppression of James studies. Philip Horne notes in his essay on James in European cinema that the presence of James illustrates that his “cultural stock continue[s] to be high” (260–61). Just how high that stock has risen can be estimated more precisely when universities and governments discourage or prevent citizens from reading his work and also when popular culture encourages it. Taken together the essays account for some of the richness of James scholarship both of yesterday and today. Jean Bessière and Miceala Symington describe James’s reception in France. Sergio Perosa expertly details James’s Italian translations. Do-natella Izzo traces with a subtle and steady hand James studies in Italy. Madeleine Danova maps the Bulgarian reception of James. Erik S. Roraback writes on the status of James in the Czech and Slovak lands. Miroslava Buchholtz deftly assays James’s Polish translators. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák concisely summarizes the James reception in Hungary. Irina Burlui-Wahrig gives a careful overview of the history of James studies in Romania. Andreea Ionescu insightfully addresses translations of James into Romanian. Tamara L. Seletrina brings readers up to date regarding James in Russia. Maria Antonia Álavarez Calleja attentively covers work on James in Spain. Eleftheria Arapoglou describes the extent of James studies in Greece. Hannu K. Riikonen writes on the reception of James in the Nordic countries and especially Finland. Denis Tredy offers a thoughtful essay on Henry James in Spanish film. As for scholars from the U.K., Angus Wrenn writes on Paul Bourget and James, and also on James and Proust; Jeremy Tambling on Henry James and European and American opera; and Philip Horne on James’s “presence” in European cinema. Finally, George Monteiro (U.S.) writes on the reception of James in Portugal. In addition, it is well worth mentioning that the “Timeline: European Reception of Henry James, 1875–2005” is superb. The equally excellent “Bibliography” includes Horne’s “A Filmography: European Film and Television Versions of Henry James,” which serves as an important supplement to J. Sarah Koch’s “A Henry James...