Jacobeana

Stephen Donadio. Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.347 pp. Susanne Kappeler. Writing and Reading in Henry James. Foreword by Tony Tanner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 242 pp. Robert Emmet Long. The Great Succession : Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.203 pp. Mary Doyle Springer. A Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 248 pp. H. Peter Stowell. Literary Impressionism : James and Chekhov. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.277 pp. Edward Wagenknecht. Eve and Henry James : Portraits of Women and Girls in His Fiction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. 217 pp. There is a remark worth remembering, that most books should have been articles, and most articles, footnotes. It is characteristic of the contemporary infatuation with criticism, as well as of the competitive environment of many universities, that scholars are inclined to magnify their insights. "Why not make it into a book?" Perhaps because the shelves are already groaning with interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations, a weight that risks to crush the very works that gave rise to them. The test of a critical work ought still to remain : does it make us return to the text with, as it were, new eyes? does it help us see something we never saw before, a meaning in the text, a relationship, a way of looking? Although all the works under examination here aim at that sort of contribution, none of them can really be said to achieve it. None of them seems likely to become part of anyone's indispensable library of Jacobeana

American and British Literature Analysis · Philosophy