Henry James, 1916–1945 Susan M. Griffin This is “my” last issue of HJR. In 1995 Daniel Mark Fogel, the founding editor of the Henry James Review, entrusted the journal that he had created to me. With it, I received the chance to engage deeply with the work of the many scholars and critics who are drawn to Henry James. That is, luckily for me, a motley crew: modernists, Victorianists, critical theorists, cultural historians, philosophers, art historians, film scholars, those working in gay studies and queer theory, marxist and psychoanalytic critics, archival and textual scholars—the list goes on and continues to expand into newer areas like media studies. At first I worried that editing a journal would keep me away from “my” work. But editing has turned out to be less a distraction and more a conversation with those who think about and with Henry James’s writing. I have been helped, or perhaps more accurately, guided, in the work of the journal by two Managing Editors, Isabel Buck McEachern, whose organization of our office and procedures put us on a firm footing, and Joanne Webb, whose tenure as a Jamesian is nearly as long as my own. As contributors to the journal have learned, Joanne, who is involved with the work of the journal at every step, is nothing less than a superb editor. Essential too has been the assistance of the many excellent Henry James Fellows who have joined us over the years. Then there are the members of the Editorial Board who not only lent their time and expertise to the regular reading of submissions but also acted as judges for the yearly Leon Edel Prize. And colleagues not on the Board have been generous as well. We have relied on high standards set—and met by—the staff at Johns Hopkins University Press, led by Bill Breichner. The accessibility provided by HJR’s participation in Project Muse has multiplied and broadened our readership. I know that others in the Jamesian community share my happiness in the fact that Greg Zacharias is the new Editor of the Henry James Review. Greg, who is the Director of the Center for Henry James Studies, Co-Editor of the Complete Letters of Henry James, and former Executive Director of the Henry James Society, as well as a generous colleague, could hardly be better qualified for the job. He has already begun with a call for the next special issue on “Emotion, Feeling, Sentiment in James.” I look forward to reading it. [End Page vii] Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Illness, Age, Death ForumIntroduction Susan M. Griffin The call for submissions for this special issue of the Henry James Review averred that “Illness, age, and death preoccupy Henry James from the beginning to the end of his writing life.” And, indeed, there is a “lame” character in James’s first published story, “A Tragedy of Error,” which appeared in 1864 in the Continental Monthly. Unsurprisingly, given the date, that story is surrounded by discussions of war and its effects: a poem, “The Angels of War,” another titled “North and South,” two pieces on the Polish situation, an essay on European reactions to the American Civil War (“National Friendships”), among others. And James’s last published story, “A Round of Visits” (1910), includes a flu-stricken protagonist and ends with a suicide. This is also the year of James’s meditation on “Is There a Life after Death?” And his late essays, collected in 1917 in Within the Rim, dwell on the victims of war, including the wounded soldiers he had visited. At his own final collapse, Henry James is said to have declared, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing.” Disability Studies as well as attention to aging and the aged ranging across fields as varied as medicine, literature, and architecture have recently allowed us to see, value, and address what had been previously ignored—at times almost invisible—topics. And, while the studies of death and its meanings in literature have a long history, innovative approaches to the cultural practices surrounding death, as well as the newly important fields of Medical Humanities and Gerontology, have broadened our inquiries. What the essays collected in this issue illustrate is the rich variety that can result when we think with and through illness, age, and death. Although we might conceive of these three topics as separate categories, and while the contributions certainly have different emphases, the arrangement of this HJR issue’s contents does not enforce such a separation. This is not only because several essays address more than one of the topics but also because the questions the authors ask, the thinkers they invoke, the claims that are made, and the James texts that are read resonate and respond together. Reading one piece returns us newly to another, as well as expands and exfoliates [End Page 205] our understandings of Henry James’s writings: “The Altar of the Dead,” The Ambassadors, “The Aspern Papers,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” “Glasses,” “The Jolly Corner,” “The Middle Years,” The Portrait of a Lady, “The Turn of the Screw,” The Wings of the Dove. Illness, age, and death are, I cannot help but say, not only lively but also live areas of thought. —SMG [End Page 206] Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press

This essay examines the material in an uncatalogued archive at Harvard’s Houghton Library regarding the 1957 Broadway production of Eugenia, based on Henry James’s The Europeans and starring Tallulah Bankhead. The archive includes letters to and from directors, actors, and producers; investors’ correspondence; publicity materials; financial records; two different scripts of Eugenia; playbills and clippings. Together they give a detailed picture of the difficulties of bringing James to the stage and suggest as well that there is further work to be done on the relationships between author, actress, and audience in James’s life and writings.

Jamesian StylesIntroduction Susan M. Griffin Henry James’s style divides his readers. There are those who “cannot”—perhaps should not—read his late work, the camp of William James and H. G. Wells. Doubtless, James’s prose lends itself to parody: Wells, Max Beerbohm, and James Thurber have shown us that. Yet for others, poets like W. H. Auden and Richard Howard among them, the pleasures of James’s style are many: a distinctive complexity that pushes language almost to its limit and does so often beautifully, always seriously, sometimes humorously. Do we find Jamesian style in the architecture of his works, the construction of his characters’ consciousnesses or the cadence—and length—of his sentences? Does it lie in the vividness of his metaphors, the verbal tics, the ambiguous pronouns, the heteroglossia of his prose (French bon mots, classed diction, fashionable slang)? Of course, there is not one Jamesian style but many, varying over time and according to genre, audience, and means of production and publication. But of Henry James’s own pronouncements on literary style—named as such—there are few. “Style” is a term that he rarely employed in criticism of his own and others’ writing. Critically, “style” is a word that James reserved almost exclusively for discussion of the visual arts and for what we would now call cultural criticism: he and his characters speak often of national styles. And yet who was more deeply responsive to the particulars of writerly style than James? Witness this tour de force, this stylish and stylized account of encountering Robert Browning’s evocation of Italy in The Ring and the Book: the breath of Browning’s own particular matchless Italy . . . takes us full in the face and remains from the first the felt rich coloured air in which we live. The quantity of that atmosphere that he had to give out is like nothing else in English poetry, any more than in English prose, that I recall; and since I am taking these liberties with him, let me take one too, a little, with the fruit of another genius shining at us here in association—with that great placed and timed prose fiction which we owe to George Eliot [End Page 199] and in which her projection of the stage and the scenery is so different a matter. Curious enough this difference where so many things make for identity—the quantity of talent, the quantity of knowledge, the high equality (or almost) of culture and curiosity, not to say of “spiritual life.” Each writer drags along a far-sweeping train, though indeed Browning’s spreads so considerably furthest; but his stirs us, to my vision, a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in “Romola,” by contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as white, and withal about as cold, as before she had benevolently entered it. . . . Shelley and Swinburne—to name only his compeers—are, I know, a part of the record. . . . Shelley, let us say in the connection, is a light and Swinburne, let us say, a sound; Browning alone of them all is a temperature. We feel it, we are in it at a plunge, with the very first pages of the thing before us. . . . Such a sensibility, at once voluptuous and analytic, sets a standard for the study of Jamesian styles. [End Page 200] Copyright © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press

Tracing James:Introduction Susan M. Griffin This special issue of the Henry James Review publishes papers presented at the Henry James Society's 2005 International Conference, "Tracing James." My brief introduction cannot hope to capture a sense of the conference's splendid setting in Venice; I can only echo James himself: "Venice. It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it." However, the essays included here do reflect the meeting's atmosphere of lively exchange among James scholars from across the globe and provide a sampling of the varied, excellent, and sometimes surprising scholarship presented on Isola di San servolo and at Ca' Dolfin. I'm delighted in particular to be able to include the plenary talks by Colm Tóibín, Leo Bersani, and Alide Cagidemetrio, who trace James and his influences across Ireland, France, and Italy; through fiction, film, and song; in persons, places, palaces, and legends. "Tracing James" was the second international conference held by the James Society, following the inaugural "Henry James Today" meeting in Paris. We are already looking forward to the third, to be held in Summer 2008 in Newport, Rhode Island. There, Henry James walked and talked, wrote and read, under the "wonderful sky" with its "unexpected resemblance to the sky of Venice." Following this map of Jamesian association, we will take up the strands of our ongoing conversation about James's work and world. Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the Dublin Times, reviews in the New York Review of Books, and other disparate venues. With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His Afterword is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten. Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

Previous article FreeBook ReviewThomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ. Thomas Leitch . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+354.Susan M. GriffinSusan M. GriffinUniversity of Louisville Search for more articles by this author University of LouisvillePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of Christ,” Thomas Leitch identifies a split between adaptation theory and film studies. The latter, he explains, judges filmic adaptations of literary texts in terms of their “fidelity” to the literature that they adapt, privileging book over film (6). He connects this practice to the work of cultural critics like E. D. Hirsch who, according to Leitch, define literacy as familiarity with canonical works and to English departments' hierarchical valuation of reading over writing. Leitch argues that an adaptation theory that rejects the fidelity standard can provide the most powerful means of critiquing these tendencies. Rather than rendering judgment about a given film's faithfulness to its original, Leitch wants to investigate and, to some extent, systematize the processes and problems of adaptation. An adaptation theory attuned to intertextuality, revision, and rewriting has, Leitch claims, “unique potential as the keystone of a new discipline of textual studies less ideologically driven, and therefore more powerful, than either contemporary literary or cultural studies” (19–20).It is not a claim that his study convincingly supports. One reason is that the battle that Leitch describes is largely over (thanks, in part, to contemporary literary and cultural studies and in part to renewed institutional recognition of pedagogy and especially writing pedagogy). What Leitch calls “the current orthodoxy of literacy” (11), by which he means training students to recognize what counts as canonical literature, is hardly an uncontested, or even dominant, practice in most English departments today. So, too, intertextuality and process are already central to classroom discourse. Because he sees adaptation theory as relatively neglected, Leitch overstates its potential importance for film and literary scholars.What Film Adaptation does provide is a wide-ranging and astute study of film adaptation that is specific in its analyses even as it traces the contours of film's complex, variable, and fluid relationships with nonfilmic narratives and images. Leitch's scope is impressive. Since “cinematic adaptation is as old as cinema itself” (22), Film Adaptation begins with 1896 and looks forward to 2007, treating turn-of-the-century one-reel films as well as “postliterary” movie adaptations of videogames (268). Included in the book's twelve chapters are studies of the problems involved in filming a life of Jesus and of re-visualizing famous illustrated books (e.g., Alice in Wonderland [1865]), an analysis of films based on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843), and of the various filmic incarnations of Sherlock Holmes. Leitch discusses the differences between adaptation and allusion, explores the authenticating claim “based on a true story,” and compares the distinct ways Alfred Hitchcock, Walt Disney, and Stanley Kubrick constructed themselves as auteurs, wresting authority from authors. Bringing an encyclopedic familiarity with films to his study, Leitch investigates the cultural moments of their making. His implicit argument is that one can understand a given instance of adaptation only by knowing the economic, political, technological, and personal conditions under which it was conceived, created (and recreated), and filmed. Although this means that, at times, Leitch rehearses familiar facts, it also makes for rich descriptions of moviemaking and generally provides convincing grounds for Leitch's claims.The bulk of Leitch's chapters is taken up with close analyses of particular films. (Although a fully illustrated version of Film Adaptations would have been both impossibly large and ridiculously expensive, the detail of Leitch's discussions, which often refer to specific shots, often made me wish that I could examine these visual images myself.) Leitch is careful to move out from these analyses to make general conclusions about the nature and structure of adaptation, as when he states, “Taken as a group, the Grinch adaptations raise five problems in adapting picture books to the screen” (192). The chapter perhaps most fully dedicated to adaptation theory as such, “Between Adaptation and Allusion,” begins by positing that these two modes—the first hypertextual; the second, intertextual—occupy opposite ends of a continuum. Drawing on and critiquing the work of previous scholars, Leitch explores possibilities for a taxonomy of possible strategies that might be located along this line. “Celebration,” “adjustment,” “revision,” “colonization”—Leitch's delineation of these terms proves to be what he calls a “failed” but productive enterprise. These models for understanding filmmakers' approaches to their materials are illuminating; however, as Leitch demonstrates, individual films remain resistant to rigid categorization: “Even apparently straightforward adaptations typically make use of many different intertextual strategies” (126).So thorough is Leitch's exploration of the structures of adaptation that he turns, in his last chapter, to “films that profess to be based on no source text at all but on a true story” (280). This is a fascinating chapter, and one for which the trajectory of Film Adaptation has well prepared us. Earlier, for example, Leitch demonstrates how the majority of Sherlock Holmes adaptations “take as their primary referent not the particular story they are ostensibly adapting…but the franchise as a whole [texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, illustrations by Sidney Paget, fan ‘scholarship’]” (213), with the aim of becoming ever more “real” versions of the Holmes story (235). “Based on a true story” films go this tactic one better, insofar as their claims refer to “a transcendental precursor master text” (288), one whose utility lies in its simultaneous truth and nonexistence. Leitch's astute analyses of these films brings him up against the question of what, finally, counts as an adaptation: “If Fargo creates its own textual source by creating an original story and then framing it as if it were true, it would seem that anything can be made to assume textual authority” (302).Yet, Leitch argues, confronting such problems is profitable because a new kind of adaptation studies, one that turns us away from texts to textualizing and textuality, can serve as a pedagogical model. Adaptation studies can teach us, and our students, to read (and write) every text as “the work-in-progress of institutional practices of rewriting” (303). Without sharing Thomas Leitch's belief that understanding the theory and practice of film adaptation uniquely qualifies one to learn those lessons, I would agree that reading Film Adaptations is a powerful exercise in learning. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 2November 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655687 Views: 4528Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Threshing FloorsA Response to Joanna Brooks Susan M. Griffin (bio) Joanna Brooks’s essay convincingly complicates the familiar literary historical narrative of how religious impulses, ideals, and beliefs were translated into secular terms. This was a narrative particularly congenial to modern literary historians, who had, for the most part, come to see “literary” and “religious” as incompatible. Exceptions were allowed only if they were sufficiently erudite (T. S. Eliot) or grotesque (Flannery O’Connor). Brooks covers concisely, but with remarkable range, the multiple ways that literary scholars have now begun to recognize that—and how—the work of American writers remained imbricated with religion throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Brooks offers hers as one of many possible genealogies. I am struck by the fact that the narrative form she chooses, that of the genealogy, is, of course, deeply, typically biblical. Indeed, there are at least three narrative structures at work in the literary histories that Brooks proposes and critiques, all of them central to Christian readings of the Bible: genealogy, typology, and teleology. (Although I take Brooks’s point about disruptions and the narrative possibilities they afford us, I would claim that for postmodernists “to look for fractal paths of revelatory discontinuities and creative heterodoxies plotted in narrative” is, in fact, to look teleologically.) The history of our discipline makes it unsurprising not only that we use these forms—genealogy, typology, and teleology—heuristically in our pedagogy, but also that they shape our scholarship and criticism. What Brooks’s essay suggests to me is not that we need to abandon these organizing heuristics, but that we need to become more conscious of them ourselves and more explicit about them with our students. I confess that I am, in part, thinking about this from the position of a department chair faced with the simultaneous proliferation—and evisceration—of the term “critical thinking” in mandates for evaluations and outcomes measures. Perhaps foregrounding these reading and writing structures can help us reclaim [End Page 441] our work and words in ways that allow for flexibility, variation, and innovation, rather than a mechanical uniformity and unanimity. How do we put together our syllabi and select the texts and writers who come together in our articles and books—and why? Primarily, however, I want to focus on the central metaphor that Brooks uses in discussing James Baldwin: that of the threshing floor. This is, as Brooks says, a powerful and pervasive trope in American evangelism. The image of the threshing floor is used several times in the Bible. It is the place where Joseph and his brothers mourn Jacob; where Ruth seduces Boaz; where Uzziah touches the Ark and is killed. The specific story that Brooks mentions in Chronicles is also narrated earlier (with some differences) in Samuel. Chronicles and Samuel tell us that David, having sinned, makes partial reparation by giving up some of his wealth to purchase a threshing floor as a fit space to perform an offering. After he sacrifices his offerings, David collects and contributes materials for his son Solomon to build on the spot a house for the Ark of the Covenant that will serve as a temple. Not worthy to take up this task, the father dictates to the next generation the narrative and the structure for its worship. At Brooks’s behest, we might think here of Jimmy Baldwin and his father’s bottles or forms. The threshing floor is, therefore, a space of humbling and of sacrifice. It is a holy place where one approaches God, a space that commentators have interpreted as the site of individual revelation, reading, and interpretation. Moreover, there is the most familiar sense of the threshing floor: the area where wheat is separated from chaff, truth from falsehood. Overall, then, it is a space of separation or sorting: profane from sacred, good from bad, true from false, essential from superficial. On the threshing floor, the individual, stripped and broken down—flailed—comes face-to-face with God. Yet it is also the space where a building and an institution are constructed. The push and pull between these last two—individualism and institution—turns out to be central in twenty...

The title of understudies, Mary Wilkins Freeman's 1901 short story collection, situates us in the realm of theater, of performance—the space where actors and their seconds together learn the grammars of verbal and visual representation.1 On the cover of Understudies, cameo portraits linked by garlands mimic the arrangement of actors' head shots on a playbill (fig. 1). But the profiles are those of a horse, a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a squirrel, and a cat. Freeman's book displays on its face the art of representing animals and humans—and animals as humans. And her title articulates a distinctly turn-of-the-century (if still unresolved) question: who are the understudies and who are the leads—animals or humans?

Reviewed by: Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing Susan M. Griffin (bio) Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing, edited by Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams; pp. xxx + 226. Liverpool: Liverpool UniversityPress, 2008, £50.00,$85.00. Prefacing this collection of essays is a 2002 sermon by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on the life and work of W. E. Gladstone. Gladstone's recognition, which should be ours, Archbishop Williams argues, was that God deals with humans through a "net of relations" (xiv), visible in diverse human forms and composing a complex unity. Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams bring together in this volume twelve studies of those forms, of the shapes that belief takes, in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The idea that religious belief flowed into and shaped secular forms in the Victorian era is, of course, an old one. The essays that comprise Shaping Belief seek to move beyond or to complicate this realization. In their introduction, "Revisioning Belief in Nineteenth-Century Writing," the editors claim that what makes this work new is the realization that "belief" must be understood as "social, cultural and political phenomena," rather than as "a specifically religious conviction" (xv). In particular, they emphasize the diverse and dynamic nature of nineteenth-century belief. Explaining that "the energy that had once been contained within religion flowed out into society and its writings" (xv-xvi), Morgan and Williams offer twelve essays that trace some of these tributaries. Shaping Belief is divided into three sections: "Religious Discourse: Transmission and Appropriation," "Shaping Subjectivities: Belief, Aesthetics and Space," and "Mediating Culture: Inscribing Democracy, Class and Social Identity." Together, the essays cover a range of examples and demonstrate the fluidities of form. Readers will find connections and resonances throughout the volume. Finally, though, the principles of selection appear arbitrary: the book is a bit of a miscellany, and Morgan and Williams's repetitive and awkwardly written preface does little to make the [End Page 354] case for the volume's integrity. (They do better in their own essays: Morgan's on Emily Dickinson and Williams's on Thomas Carlyle.) That said, several of the contributions are very strong. The best-written of these is Philip Davis's lively "Isaiah and Ezekiel—But What about Charley? An Essay on 'Wanting to Believe'" (reprinted from The Reader), which urges us to take seriously the idea, and the feeling, of wanting to believe. Davis uses examples ranging from George MacDonald to William James to discuss the uses of the "instrumental and provisional" in matters of belief (65). Rather than distancing ourselves from Victorians' crises of faith, we might better deploy their strategies of behaving "as if." Although their arguments and tones differ, Davis joins Archbishop Williams as preacher, exhorting audiences to look to the Victorians. Both writers maintain that we can, and should, find in the nineteenth century modern models for sophisticated, even skeptical, believing. Other contributors to this volume also offer what might be viewed as apologia for nineteenth-century modes of thought. Implicit here is the felt need to combat the Modernist legacy of discomfort with—and disdain for—religious belief. While Victorian studies has been less warped by this academic prejudice than other fields, the study of religion has been taken up with new interest and energy over the past decade. In Shaping Belief discussions of F. D. Maurice, Octavia Hill, Josephine Butler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, and Matthew Arnold all describe convincingly the complex subjectivities engendered by the problem of belief in the period. For example, addressing both Dickens's critics and his defenders, Juliet John rejects "the idea that his commercial humanism must be viewed as decisively sincere or insincere, personal or wholesale" (205). Situating Dickens's notions of personal and public within the marketplace, John astutely analyzes Dickens's self-representations, including, especially, that of the "Shadow." She argues that both the private and the public personae of "Charles Dickens" were "himself and not himself" (205). Other fine essays are those by Alison Milbank on sacrifice, violence, and doubles in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Kirstie Blair on church architecture and Tractarian poetry...

ViCtOriAn StuDieS / VOLuMe 51, nO. 2 to be the locus of authentic religious experience, in practice it could be pretty secular; she further points out that both domesticity and Catholicism had particular relevance to Victorian women. that claim introduces a lot of links in the chain of associations, and, after the introduction, LaMonaca (wisely, i think) largely drops atheism as the central aspect of her study (although it does come back with a wonderful twist in the chapter on eliot). the real strength of this book is in its focus on gender; it is fundamentally about nineteenth-century women’s complicated and often contradictory engagements with Catholicism. Atheism and domesticity play important supporting roles but don’t really deserve the star billing that the title and subtitle give them. Perhaps because of the need to shoehorn everything into “masked atheism,” LaMonaca closes not with Brontë or rossetti or eliot but with a long passage from newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), a passage neither about women nor domesticity but rather about atheism and belief. After the engaging arguments about women’s writings and lives, that shift is rather jarring. But it cannot overcome the pleasures and the archival discoveries of this book. it is worth reading and learning from. Patrick R. O’Malley Georgetown University

Chapter 28 James and Film Susan M. Griffin, Susan M. Griffin Professor Chair University of Louisville, USASearch for more papers by this author Susan M. Griffin, Susan M. Griffin Professor Chair University of Louisville, USASearch for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Greg W. Zacharias, Greg W. Zacharias Professor Director project director Creighton University, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 September 2008 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304978.ch28 AboutPDFPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShareShare a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Summary This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading A Companion to Henry James RelatedInformation

Jamesian Forms:Introduction Susan M. Griffin Thinking about James and form, it's hard to tell where to stop. One could quote endlessly—and profitably—from the prefaces; look carefully at the many genres in which James wrote; analyze how the history of formalist criticism—whether New Critical or structuralist—has been intertwined with James's writing; or uncover the rhetorical and narrative forms that structure his works. James's focus on form was both deliberate and habitual, from his criticism of shapeless English fiction to the architectural metaphors that pervade his own prose. This rich variety is reflected in the contributions to this special issue, which discuss, among other things, James's reading, style, word choice, punctuation, readers, publishing history, and dramatic form(s). What's striking is how much of these essays is literally given over to James. Quoting expansively, each of the contributors proceeds by means of the kind of close reading that is the hallmark of formalism. Formalism, here, variously "new" in its simultaneous attention to ethics, to psychoanalysis, to queer theory, to the reader, and to the history of texts and their publications. Or perhaps it is not so new, insofar as James's own "formalism" was never detached or pure. As artist and as critic, James wrote always with an awareness of changing historical, cultural, and material circumstances. "The Art of Fiction," to take James's first important disquisition on the question of fictional form, is written explicitly in response to another critic's work. Arguing that fiction-writing is an art, a deliberate act of composition worthy of critical scrutiny, James situates those acts of creation amid national differences among artists and audiences and literary marketplaces. The essay is personal in tone; analyzing the psychology of reading, James repeatedly turns to his own experience. National reading and writing practices turn out to be central, too, to Peter Brooks's discussion of a form with which the Master is not often associated: the dirty French novel. In James's remarks on French writers, Brooks traces the novelist's shifting solutions to the problem of representing sex and sexuality. Those yellow books have multiple uses in James's fiction, not least, Brooks argues, as signifying objects for the sex that James can then leave unspoken, making the work of imaginative specification the reader's part. [End Page 199] David Kurnick's essay shifts the discussion from matters of morality and taste to ethics. Kurnick looks for Jamesian ethics, however, not, as philosophers have so often done, in stories or plots or even characters, but in style. The insistent stylistic uniformity (across characters and narrator) of James's fiction posits, he argues, a "performative universalism." We can read The Wings of the Dove as, in part, the story of this stylistic attempt at a visionary collectivity, one that is ultimately undermined by the exigencies of a plot and an economy of desire. The details of Jamesian style receive close attention in essays by Lee Clark Mitchell and Rebekah Scott. Mitchell focuses minutely on "scare quotes," a punctuation choice and rhetorical technique with narrative implications. Enforcing an ironic distance, these self-conscious marks, Mitchell argues, highlight figuration in James's ghost story "The Jolly Corner." The alternations between presence and absence in the tale are figured in the ways its words shimmer back and forth between literal and figurative meanings. Scott, too, takes a microscope to a Jamesian text, focusing on a single—albeit ubiquitous—word: "form." Like Kurnick, Scott is interested in looking at Jamesian ethics as a matter of style rather than one of plot or character. Her attempt is to recognize "the distinctness of literature and ethics as linguistic enterprises whose vocabularies (even when identical) must be read differently." Close attention to the semantic level of James's prose—and in particular to the over-determined, perhaps even over-used word "form"—Scott argues, frustrates any easy equation of the aesthetic and the ethical. Daniel O'Hara traces the pleasures of the text(s) in two Jamesian artist-tales. "The Story of a Masterpiece" and "The Liar" share similar plots, but are constructed differently. James changes point of view in the later story and...

Summarizing the Gothic history of sensationalism, Patrick Brantlinger traces a movement from the religious to the secular: "By a kind of metaphoric sleight of hand, the Gothic romance has managed to make secular mystery seem like a version of religious mystery." By the time of sensationalism, Brantlinger argues, there is "not even a quasi-religious content" (32). Without claiming that sensation novels are, as such, religious, I nonetheless want to suggest that anti-Catholicism can provide those masks, cloaks, and mysteries, ready-made, as it were. 1 One way to achieve the sleight of hand by which the secular takes on a religious aura is by brandishing the narrative vestments and vestiges inherited from the Gothic.

Introduction Joseph Epstein's evocative short story, "The Master's Ring," opens this HJR issue on "Senses of the Past," introducing many of its themes and topics. We can easily discern the outline of Leon Edel standing behind this tale, which significantly borrows and departs from the life of the Master's biographer. Looking back to James, Epstein tells the story of a man who erases his own past as he lays claim to—even tries to inhabit—that of another. Traceable too in "The Master's Ring" is the plotting of "The Aspern Papers," with its portrait of the dead romantic artist and the predatory and parasitical "publishing scoundrel." Obsession with the material artifacts of the past—Aspern's papers—is echoed in first Epstein's biographer's and then his narrator's fetishization of the Master's ring. James knew well the consumer and cultural values of antique things. But the deep desire for a material communion with the past can also be construed as James does in the preface to "The Aspern Papers": I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable. "The Master's Ring" imagines a reader of James who tries to reach the Master, contemplating a literal—if mediated—sense of the past. Palpable indeed. But how to traverse time through writing? Returning to the Sense of the Past manuscript, James confidently claimed "I grasp this entirely; I see how 'narrative representation' most permits, most effectively prepares and accompanies, my turning of the present screw, and what a part picture and image and evoked aspect and sense can play for me in that connection"—though, as we know, the novel remained unfinished. The essays that follow touch on Jamesian senses and pasts of great diversity. James looks back to Washington Irving, William Shakespeare, and Charles [End Page 201] Dickens; Gertrude Stein and Percy Lubbock represent their literary and critical forbear. Included are discussions of James's short fiction, last great novel, and unfinished narrative; his autobiographies, prefaces, and travel writings. Alison Booth's "The Real Right Place of Henry James" uncovers in James's writing the contemporary discourse of "homes and haunts" literature. Reading English Hours and The American Scene, along with "The Real Right Thing," "The Death of the Lion," and "The Birthplace," Booth visits Stratford-on-Avon, the Hudson River Valley, and Rye, analyzing the reproductions of literary pasts. Tamara Follini's "James, Dickens, and the Indirections of Influence" turns to literary pasts as well, tracing Charles Dickens's "influence" on James in unexpected ways. Following Dickens to London, James experiences a hallucinatory receptiveness, a loosening of formal control that Follini sees as characteristic of Dickens's narratives, both fictional and autobiographical. Characterizing, in turn, Gertrude Stein's loose relations with her American literary predecessor, Eric Haralson finds in Four in America evidence that Stein constructed a "queer solidarity" with James's earlier example. "Rereading Gertrude Stein Rereading Henry James (After a Fashion)" proposes that Stein's interested reading of "general" James's life in works looks to both his gender-crossing and his literary aspirations to—and refusals of—popularity. In "The Disease of Temporality; or, Forgetful Reading in James and Lubbock" Nicholas Dames excavates the pervasiveness of retrospection in James's critical reading. What Percy Lubbock makes of this practice is, however, a novel theory premised on forgetfulness. Dames situates both James's mnemonic and Lubbock's amnesiac thinking about...

MY SUBJECT is doubly suspect: polemical religious fiction by Frances Trollope. Victorian Studies has, of course, always stressed the centrality of religion to nineteenth-century culture. Yet, paging through Robert Lee Wolff's magisterial 1977 Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England, what is striking is how little advantage has been taken of his work, how few of the fictions he describes have made their way into critical conversation about the Victorian novel. In 1989 John Sutherland mapped what he called the unexplored “lost continent” of non-canonical Victorian fiction (1). Modernism's lingering legacy has meant, I would argue, that novels of religious controversy by women continue to comprise one of that continent's darkest reaches.For general surveys of nineteenth-century Anglo-American religious fiction, see Franchot, Leavis, Maison, Reynolds, Wolff. More specific studies of individual writers and works are beginning to be done, as suggested by new work presented at the 1998 18th- and 19th-Century Women Writers Conference (e.g., Cronin; Freed; Griffin, “Fathers”; LaMonaca; Melnyk).