Henry James: Literary Criticism Vol. 2 (Loa #23): European Writers and Prefaces to the New York Edition

By Henry James

Book Overview

Henry James, renowned as one of the world's great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume is one of two volumes of the most extensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, with many pieces never before available in book form. It includes reviews of a great number of European writers, especially French writers, along with more general essays and the Prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works, published between 1907 and 1909.

More than one hundred reviews and essays are gathered by author, so that readers can trace the development of James's complex, meditative, and highly volatile attitudes toward a wide spectrum of literature. James reviews the formidable Honor de Balzac (with his "huge, all compassing, all desiring, all devouring love of reality"), Gustave Flaubert ("a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word"), and Ivan Turgenev, the Russian visitor in Paris, with whom James felt great personal affinity, even though Tugenev "lacked the immense charm of absorbed inventiveness."

James delivers his critical judgments with great elegance and point, especially when he discusses the performance of other critics like Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and, of course, he can be wonderfully acerbic. An early moralistic essay on Baudelaire finds Poe "vastly the greater charlatan of the two, and the greater genius."

James brings his critical zest, exhilaration, and independence of judgment to bear on writers as diverse as Alphonse Daudet, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Th ophile Gautier, J. W. von Goethe, and Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Readers will find, in the complete collection of the Prefaces, one of literature's most revealing artistic autobiographies, a wholly absorbing account of how writing gets written, and a vision of the possibilities for fiction which critics and novelists of later times will find immensely instructive and liberating.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940450232
• ISBN13: 9780940450233
• Release Date: December 1984
• Publisher: Library of America, The
• Length: 1408 Pages
• Weight: 1.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 5.2" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

The master at work

This is the most comprehensive collection of James' literary criticism ever assembled in one volume. It also contains the masterpiece 'New York Prefaces' to his novels. James is one of the supreme artists in formulating an appreciation and understanding of what his art is all about. He sets the tone in fact for the literary critics who will come to interpret his work,(Leavis, Dupee, Edel et al.) a tone of civilized mastery and perceptive intelligence. A diligent cultured informed tone capable of the most refined critical distinctions, and yet with narrative power even in works of criticism. James also is of course a master critic of the art of others, and this volume contains many examples of this, in his writing of Flaubert , Turgenev, Poe, Maupassant just to name a few.

One of the Best LOA James Editions

Of particular interest in this volume are James' reviews of Balzac and Turgenev, and the prefaces he wrote for the New York Edition of his own work.