This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multi-volume New York Edition of Henry James’s fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing—character, plot, point of view, inspiration—and explains how he came to write novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American. As Blackmur puts it, “criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful.”

The latest edition of this influential work includes a foreword by bestselling author Colm Tóibín, whose critically acclaimed novel The Master is told from the point of view of Henry James. As a guide not only to James’s inspiration and execution, but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of James’s fiction and to aspiring writers.

The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also remembered and commemorated by poets and fiction writers who understood that the war had bequeathed both historical and symbolic meanings to American culture. Although the defeated Confederacy became best known for producing a literature of nostalgia and an ideological defensiveness intended to protect the South's own version of history, authors loyal to the Union also confronted the question of what the memory of the war signified, and how to shape the literary response to that individual and collective experience.

In Ashes of the Mind, Martin Griffin examines the work of five Northerners—three poets and two fiction writers—who over a period of four decades tried to understand and articulate the landscape of memory in postwar America, and in particular in that part of the nation that could, with most justification, claim the victory of its beliefs and values. The book begins with an examination of the rhetorical grandeur of James Russell Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode, ranges across Herman Melville's ironic war poetry, Henry James's novel of North-South reconciliation, The Bostonians, and Ambrose Bierce's short stories, and ends with the bitter meditation on race and nation presented by Paul Laurence Dunbar's elegy “Robert Gould Shaw.” Together these texts reveal how a group of representative Northern writers were haunted in different ways by the memory of the 
conflict and its fraught legacy.

Griffin traces a concern with individual and community loss, ambivalence toward victory, and a changing politics of commemoration in the writings of Lowell, Melville, James, Bierce, and Dunbar. What links these very different authors is a Northern memory of the war that became more complex and more compromised as the century went on, often replacing a sense of justification and achievement with a perception of irony and failed promise.

Henry James was not only a prolific novelist but also a prolific letter writer. This edition of 150 previously unpublished letters to four of his female contemporaries reveals James to be a warm, witty, and astute commentator on a world now lost. The James revealed in these engaging letters is a vital, clever, and lively man with an intense interest in affairs of his day. The letters present a delightful picture of Victorian-Edwardian culture, including health cures (Fletcherizing and going to health spas), literary scandals (he feared writer Edith Wharton would be destroyed by her mad husband Teddy), domestic affairs (the marriage market, child rearing, antiquing, decorating, and gardening), and historical events (the Civil War, Queen Victoria's funeral, England's great Coal Strike, the Dreyfus case, and World War I).Susan Gunter has selected and annotated correspondence between James and four women in his social milieu: Alice Howe Gibbens James, wife of William James; Mary Cadwalader Jones, wife of Frederic Rhinelander Jones (New York socialite and Edith Wharton's brother); Mary Frances Prothero, wife of Cambridge academic Sir George Prothero; and Lady Louisa Wolseley, wife of Viscount Garnet Wolseley, commander-in-chief of the British Forces. Of the 10,000 extant letters by James, over two-thirds of them have never been published. The selection presented here is designed to reveal the writer's human side, his humorous and warm views of Anglo-American life over a fifty-year span, as well as his intimate participation in nineteenth-century women's daily lives. Editor Susan Gunter has provided an introduction that offers a helpful historical overview of nineteenth-century women's roles, a biographical register of people mentioned in the letters, a chronology, and brief biographies of the four women correspondents. Readers interested in gender studies, biography, intellectual and cultural history, and literary history will find this book fascinating.

While the novelist Henry James never formed a permanent relationship with a single individual, in the last decades of his life he increasingly formed passionate attachments to younger men of diverse talents and traits. Dearly Beloved Friends collects carefully edited texts of an ample selection of the writer's personal and often intimate letters -- many of them long withheld from publication -- to four of those men: the sculptor Hendrik Andersen (1872-1940), the dilettante Dudley Jocelyn Persse (1873-1943), and the writers Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920) and Sir Hugh Walpole (1884-1941). These letters reveal the humourous, warm side of the literary "Master," and document as never before the depth and eroticism of his love for a number of his friends. Witty, poignant, and passionate, the letters reveal a man in full control of both his rhetoric and his relationships.

When Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became her "inner circle." This group included both well-known figures, such as James, Percy Lubbock, and Bernard Berenson, and several now forgotten, including John Hugh Smith, Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton, and Howard Sturgis.

Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored. She explores how the group, which began forming around 1904 and lasted until Wharton's death in 1937, defined itself against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticizing and accommodating the one it found in Europe. Tracing Wharton's individual relationships with these men and their relationships with one another, she examines literary kinships and movements in the biographical and feminist context of gender, exile, and aesthetics. She also relates the group to other literary circles, such as the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein's salon.

An experiment in criticism that explores Henry James’s late works through the lens of minimalism.  

Henry James’s last completed novels—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl—are among the greatest and most demanding achievements of modern fiction. The stories they tell are perverse: characters are compelling even at their most cruel, their actions often calculating and loving at the same time. The novels draw on deep-seated myths but end with an unsettling lack of finality. And their dense, involuted language tracks the movements of consciousness with uncompromising artistry—the ultimate flowering of the late James style.

In this work of experimental criticism, John Brenkman is concerned with minimalism in two senses. First, with James’s own minimalism—his intense scrutiny of couples and their erotic energies to the exclusion of so much else. And second, through a kind of minimalization in literary critical reading, Brenkman cuts through James’s amplifications to find the essence that churns beneath the intricate prose of the late novels. Showing how James evokes not only protagonists’ subjectivity but more importantly what only exists in between—that is, between lovers, between spouses, between rivals—Brenkman reveals James’s transformation of the marriage novel and excavation of the couple form itself.

The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description—what Virginia Woolf called “that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool.” As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust.

Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. Strange Likeness will enliven conversations around narrative theory, affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy.