Revising Henry James

N his sixties, Henry James spent four years of his life creating I the definitive collection of his fiction, the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (published 1907-1909). Selecting the fiction he wanted to represent him after his death, revising that fiction and defending his artistic choices in his prefaces, and directing the design of the edition's physical features (frontispieces, binding, paper, and type), James re-presented his individual works, his career, and, thus, himself by defining how we should confront the corpus of his texts and the text of his artistic life. The entire project of the New York Edition became, in a sense, the project of revising Henry James. By attempting to present James's artistic oeuvre as a structured, unified whole, the New York Edition announced James as an author in the Foucauldian sense of the word, as one who seeks to control the production and dissemination of his work.' As an example of the kinds of revision (re-seeing) James did for this project, the New York Edition of The Aspern Papers (I908) appeared with not only new textual revisions but also a preface, a frontispiece, and new companion tales in volume twelve of the New York Edition.2 If we consider the revisions of The Aspern Papers, then, not merely as the textual variations between the first edition (i888) and the I908 edition, but as a narrative of revision that extends from the original idea recorded in James's notebooks to

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Reading (process) · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy

• Between Aura and Access

  Tim Sommer•Anglia - Zeitschrift für…•2020

  Incluir item

• Volatile Memories

  Open Access•Rob Gallagher•Games and Culture•2019

  Incluir item