With painful consistency, Henry James denied his characters the experience of fulfilled love. Not surprisingly, many critics have concluded that he simply could not accept the idea of people loving. Yet in the final pages of The Golden Bowl, James affirms and celebrates the renewal of Maggie Verver's marriage and the consummation of her passion. How did he arrive at this belated embrace of love? David McWhirter argues that James' last three novels - usually seen as a homogenous phase in his career - in fact embody a radical refashioning of his vision. The Ambassadors culminates James' lifelong commitment to desire, a solipsistic 'imagination of loving' that deliberately flees fulfilment. But through his acceptance of life's tragic finitude in The Wings of the Dove, James attains a new capacity - realised in The Golden Bowl - to will the death of desire's infinite but illusory imaginings in the limited reality of enacted love. Combining formalist, ethical and psychobiographical perspectives, McWhirter provides an important rereading of James' late novels, challenging prevailing views of the 'major phase' as life-denying retreat into a refined but sterile art.

Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political, and material realities of his time. As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsive not only to his era's changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and the emergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions of time and space. These essays portray the author and his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed, interested, appalled, and/or provoked his always curious mind. With contributions from an international cast of distinguished scholars, Henry James in Context provides a map of leading edge work in contemporary James studies, an invaluable reference work for students and scholars, and a blueprint for possible future directions.

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.

With painful consistency, Henry James denied his characters the experience of fulfilled love. Not surprisingly, many critics have concluded that he simply could not accept the idea of people loving. Yet in the final pages of The Golden Bowl, James affirms and celebrates the renewal of Maggie Verver's marriage and the consummation of her passion. How did he arrive at this belated embrace of love? David McWhirter argues that James' last three novels - usually seen as a homogenous phase in his career - in fact embody a radical refashioning of his vision. The Ambassadors culminates James' lifelong commitment to desire, a solipsistic 'imagination of loving' that deliberately flees fulfilment. But through his acceptance of life's tragic finitude in The Wings of the Dove, James attains a new capacity - realised in The Golden Bowl - to will the death of desire's infinite but illusory imaginings in the limited reality of enacted love. Combining formalist, ethical and psychobiographical perspectives, McWhirter provides an important rereading of James' late novels, challenging prevailing views of the 'major phase' as life-denying retreat into a refined but sterile art.

Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political, and material realities of his time. As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsive not only to his era's changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity, but also to changing conditions of literary production and reception, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, and the emergence of new technologies and media, of new apprehensions of time and space. These essays portray the author and his works in the context of the modernity that determined, formed, interested, appalled, and/or provoked his always curious mind. With contributions from an international cast of distinguished scholars, Henry James in Context provides a map of leading edge work in contemporary James studies, an invaluable reference work for students and scholars, and a blueprint for possible future directions.

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels. The thirty illustrations include all twenty-four frontispiece photographs made, under James's supervision, for the edition.