"There is much to praise in Blair's book: her mastery of the relevant scholarship, her illuminating, often brilliant, analyses of individual texts, her wide-ranging insight into the events, places, institutions, and ideas that engaged James's mind to become the experience he transformed into art." Elsa Nettels, The Henry James Review

• Introduction: making a difference: Henry James, literary culture, and racial theater; 1. First impressions: 'Questions of Ethnography' and the art of travel; 2. 'Preparation for culture': Anthony Trollope, the American Century, and the fiction of freedom; 3. 'Trying to be Natural': authorship and the power of type in The Princess Casamassima; 4. James, Jack the Ripper, and the cosmopolitan Jew: staging authorship in The Tragic Muse; 5. Documenting the alien: racial theater in The American Scene.

"There is much to praise in Blair's book: her mastery of the relevant scholarship, her illuminating, often brilliant, analyses of individual texts, her wide-ranging insight into the events, places, institutions, and ideas that engaged James's mind to become the experience he transformed into art." Elsa Nettels, The Henry James Review

• Introduction: making a difference: Henry James, literary culture, and racial theater; 1. First impressions: 'Questions of Ethnography' and the art of travel; 2. 'Preparation for culture': Anthony Trollope, the American Century, and the fiction of freedom; 3. 'Trying to be Natural': authorship and the power of type in The Princess Casamassima; 4. James, Jack the Ripper, and the cosmopolitan Jew: staging authorship in The Tragic Muse; 5. Documenting the alien: racial theater in The American Scene.

"There is much to praise in Blair's book: her mastery of the relevant scholarship, her illuminating, often brilliant, analyses of individual texts, her wide-ranging insight into the events, places, institutions, and ideas that engaged James's mind to become the experience he transformed into art." Elsa Nettels, The Henry James Review

• Introduction: making a difference: Henry James, literary culture, and racial theater; 1. First impressions: 'Questions of Ethnography' and the art of travel; 2. 'Preparation for culture': Anthony Trollope, the American Century, and the fiction of freedom; 3. 'Trying to be Natural': authorship and the power of type in The Princess Casamassima; 4. James, Jack the Ripper, and the cosmopolitan Jew: staging authorship in The Tragic Muse; 5. Documenting the alien: racial theater in The American Scene.