3 Review(s)

The new series of WRITERS AND THEIR WORK continues a tradition of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the most recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging reappraisal of a writer's major work. Most innovative of Victorian and Edwardian novelists, James transformed fiction by anti-realist modes of symbolic action, puzzles, gaps, and narrative uncertainties, devices emphasized in his own and later theory. In this original and accessible study, Barbara Hardy concentrates on the late period from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors. The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, 'The Jolly Corner' and other tales, autobiography, travel, and the influential criticism. She offers new interpretations of the major novels, and revaluation of the literary criticism in the context of later ideas, which James's theory and practice anticipate. James's art is read as 'writerly' narrative, whose riddles are fun, whose language is wit, whose sexuality is passionate and whose sexual politics and sense of history are radical.