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Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition

Edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson

“Also, we realize, James possessed a point of view tailor-made for the vocation of literary criticism. The critic’s life, he wrote in one essay, ‘is heroic, for it is immensely vicarious. He has to understand for others.’”— The New York Times

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Save $30 when you buy both volumes of Henry James’s literary criticism

Henry James, renowned as one of the world’s great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times.

This Library of America volume is one of two volumes of the most extensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, with many pieces never before available in book form. It includes reviews of a great number of European writers, especially French writers, along with more general essays and the Prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works, published between 1907 and 1909.

The collection attests to James’s nearly unparalleled creative energy and to the reach of his theoretical and interpretive curiosity. His unique authority as a commentator draws upon the European-American contrast that is a central circumstance of his own fiction. A member of intellectual circles on both continents, he became the foremost interpreter to American readers of the literary and cultural life of Europe.

More than one hundred reviews and essays are gathered by author, so that readers can trace the development of James’s complex, meditative, and highly volatile attitudes toward a wide spectrum of literature. James reviews the formidable Honoré de Balzac (with his “huge, all compassing, all desiring, all devouring love of reality”), Gustave Flaubert (“a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word”), and Ivan Turgenev, the Russian visitor in Paris, with whom James felt great personal affinity, even though Tugenev “lacked the immense charm of absorbed inventiveness.”

James delivers his critical judgments with great elegance and point, especially when he discusses the performance of other critics like Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and, of course, he can be wonderfully acerbic. An early moralistic essay on Baudelaire finds Poe “vastly the greater charlatan of the two, and the greater genius.”

James brings his critical zest, exhilaration, and independence of judgment to bear on writers as diverse as Alphonse Daudet, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, J. W. von Goethe, and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Readers will find, in the complete collection of the Prefaces, one of literature’s most revealing artistic autobiographies, a wholly absorbing account of how writing gets written, and a vision of the possibilities for fiction which critics and novelists of later times will find immensely instructive and liberating.

Leon Edel (1907-1997), volume editor, was emeritus professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. His five-volume biography of Henry James received both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Mark Wilson, associate editor of this volume, was professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Henry James: Literary Criticism: French & Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition is kept in print by a gift from Richard Poirier to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

French Writers
André-Marie and Jean-Jacque Ampère
Honoré de Balzac
Charles Baudelaire
Charles de Bernard and Gustave Flaubert
Victor Cherbuliez
Pére Chocarne
Alphonse Daudet
Ximenses Doudan
Gustave Droz
Alexandre Dumas
Octave Feuillet
Gustave Flaubert
Eugène Fromentin
Théophile Gautier
Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin
Émile de Girardin
Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau
Edmond de Goncourt
Eugénie de Guérin
Maurice de Guérin
Victor Hugo
Joseph Joubert
Horace de Lagardie
Auguste Laugel
John Lemoinne
Pierre Loti
Guy de Maupassant
Charles de Mazade
Prosper Mérimée
Gustave de Molinari
Émile Montégut
Alfred de Musset
Henri Regnault
Ernest Renan
Madame de Sabran
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
George Sand
Jules Sandeau
Edmond Schérer
Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle)
Anne Sohie Swetchine
Hippolyte Taine
Victor Tissot
Émile Zola

Other European Writers
Moritz Busch
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Julius Rodenberg
Matilde Serao
Ivan Turgenev

Prefaces to the New York Edition
I. Roderick Hudson
I. The American
III & IV. The Portrait of a Lady
IV & VI. The Princess Casamassima
VII & VIII. The Tragic Muse
IX. The Awkward Age
X. The Spoils of Poynton, A London Life, The Chaperon
XI. What Maisie Knew, The Pupil, In the Cage
XII The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces
XIII. The Reverberator, Madame de Mauves, A Passionate Pilgrim, The Madonna of the Future, Louisa Pallant
XIV. Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, A Bundle of Letters, The Point of View
XV. The Lesson of the Master, The Death of the Lion, The Next Time, The Figure in the Carpet, The Coxon Fund
XVI. The Author of Beltraffio, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, Broken Wings, The Tree of Knowledge, The Abasement of the Northmores, The Great Good Place, Four Meetings, Paste, Europe, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, Fordham Castle
XVII. The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, The Private Life, Owen Wingrave, The Friends of the Friends, Sir Edmund Orme, The Real Right Thing, The Jolly Corner, Julia Bride
XVIII. Daisy Miller, Pandora, The Patagonia, The Marriages, The Real Thing, Brooksmith, The Beldonald Holbein, The Story In It, Flickerbridge, Mrs. Medwin
XIX & XX. The Wings of the Dove
XXI & XXII. The Ambassadors
XXIII & XXIV. The Golden Bowl

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ISBN: 978-0-94045023-3 1408 pages

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N° 23 Library of America Series

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