A Historical Guide To Henry James

An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.

A Study Guide for Henry James's "The American," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Martha Banta’s Henry James: An Alien’s “History” of America is the product of a lifetime of thinking about James and his odd, but oddly productive, relation to the land of his birth. A “biography” of an “autobiography,” it serves as a peripatetic history of the central cross-currents and intersections between Europe and America, memory and history, romance and realism. These diverse elements structure James’s channeling of his own experience as a displaced or “alienated” American into a variety of genres: memoirs and travel writing, novels and tales, letters and literary criticism, social and cultural commentary. Together they constitute the “never completed novel” of his ongoing “autobiographical” project. In its masterful weaving together of materials, text, and time-frames, Henry James: An Alien’s “History” of America moves fluidly back and forth over the intricate tapestry of James’s life and texts. It identifies and analyzes key moments, words, and tropes that echo across the years, tracing the instances of repetition, reversal, self-revelation, and re-vision that underwrite this “life-record.” This study represents a major advance over conventional, sometimes oversimplified readings of James’s “international theme.” His attitudes about both Europe and America emerge here in their full complexity and contradictoriness. The breadth and depth of Banta’s knowledge of James and of the historical America from which he emerged and which he never ceased to engage, however ambivalently, will make this a rich reading experience for general readers as well as scholars. David McWhirter editor of Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship and Henry James in Context.

The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.

With contributions from major scholars of African American literature, history, and cultural studies, A Historical Guide to James Baldwin focuses on the four tumultous decades that defined the great author's life and art. Providing a comprehensive examination of Baldwin's varied body of work that includes short stories, novels, and polemical essays, this collection reflects the major events that left an indelible imprint on the iconic writer: civil rights, black nationalism and the struggle for gay rights in the pre- and post-Stonewall eras. The essays also highlight Baldwin's under-studied role as a trans-Atlantic writer, his lifelong struggle with faith, and his use of music, especially the blues, as a key to unlock the mysteries of his identity as an exile, an artist, and a black American in a racially hostile era.

In New York Revisited, first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1906, Henry James describes turn-of-the-century New York in vivid detail. Although written in 1904-1905, when James returned to the U.S. after living abroad for more than 20 years, the essay is as pertinent today as it was 100 years ago. The text appears as it was originally published and is enhanced with period illustrations and photographs. Beautifully bound and with a spectacular view of the Flatiron building on the cover, this book is a literary treasure.

For each of the stories of Henry James, the author provides an introduction; a discussion of the publication history, the circumstances of composition, the sources and influences, the story's relation to other works of James, critical approaches to the work, and the history of the its interpretation; and a list of works cited. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Study Guide for Henry James's "Wings of the Dove," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.