Cambridge Scholars Publishing Transforming Henry James

Employing a wide range of interpretive and theoretical approaches, this collection brings together distinguished James scholars from four continents to elicit new and exciting readings of a diverse array of James’s fiction and non-fiction. Through their transformative acts, the essays investigate James’s life-long engagement with cities, places, and tourist sites; offer theoretically informed readings of his work’s textual richness; and explore his intricate involvement with social and cultural issues, such as gender and sexuality, economics, friendship and hospitality, and visual culture. Arranged under rubrics which signal the complex interrelations of Henry James as a historical individual and of the works he authored with a web of social, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses, the contributions collected in this book make a convincing case for the ongoing productivity of James’s oeuvre when interrogated from new critical angles and, therefore, for its enduring centrality to the concerns of literary and cultural studies. Review Transforming Henry James is surprising because rarely does one find an arrangement of scholarship that is, overall, as mature, accessible, dense and important, and widely representative not only of the best newer positions in Henry James studies, but of the discipline s traditional approaches and areas of discussion as well. The essays themselves, from first to last, with no interruption and virtually no weak members, are first-rate: thoughtful, careful, often provocative, and always interesting and worth reading and thinking about. The scholarship and annotation, with nearly no exceptions, is superb. So important is the combination of strong essays, editorial crafting, and superb scholarship that I would make it required reading for any advanced undergraduate or graduate-level course having to do with Henry James studies or any one of the subject areas that organize the collection. James scholars and others interested in Henry James studies would serve themselves well by reading Transforming Henry James. --Greg Zacharias, Executive Director of the Henry James Society, Creighton University Transforming Henry James brings together an international group of scholars, new and established. This unusually wide-ranging collection of essays represents the lively diversity of James studies today --Susan M. Griffin, Editor of The Henry James Review, University of Louisville This volume brings together work by James scholars young and old; American, English, and Continental; theoretical and interpretive; historically-minded and future-oriented. In its dazzling range, its thorough canvassing of the major issues that arise in and through James s work; and in its imaginative amplitude, it does justice to the infinite variety of James s achievement and testifies to the continuing vitality of his work as a goad to criticism of the highest order. Jamesians and non-Jamesians alike will find this an invaluable addition to their collection --Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan About the Author Anna De Biasio is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Bergamo, Italy. She has written essays on a number of nineteenth-century American authors and is the author of Romanzi e musei: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James e il rapporto con l’arte (2006), a study of the rise of museums, tourism, and the “art novel” in the US. Anna Despotopoulou is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Athens, Greece. She is the co-editor of Henry James and the Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Reconstructing Pain and Joy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) and author of several articles on Henry James and nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. Donatella Izzo is Professor of American Literature at “L’Orientale” University, Naples, Italy. A former President of the Henry James Society, she is the author of Po