5 - Critical Revisions: James in the Academy

Summary

When you re-read coldly and critically a book which in former years you have read warmly and carelessly, you are surprised to see how it changes its proportions.

— Henry James, “George Eliot”

BEGINNING IN THE 1960s, interest in James shifted to the academy, and those writing about James increasingly were scholars trained in literary analysis and theory. Biographical information emerging from Leon Edel's study inspired a Freudian reading of some of James's fiction, but other critical perspectives also informed James studies, including feminist, Marxist, and reader-response criticism; semiotics; the psychoanalytic criticism of Jacques Lacan; and the cultural criticism of Michel Foucault. Dorothy McInnis Scura's Henry James, 1960–1974: A Reference Guide and Judith Funston's Henry James, 1975–1987: A Reference Guide show that James studies has developed into a major scholarly industry, with around 150 and sometimes over two hundred articles and books published yearly, for a total of more than 4,500 items to date. Sarah B. Daugherty's overviews of criticism that appear annually in American Literary Scholarship testify to continuing productivity. Besides critical articles appearing in already established scholarly journals, in 1979 the Henry James Society inaugurated the Henry James Review, edited by Daniel Mark Fogel; and several publishers — notably Norton in its Critical Edition series and Bedford/St. Martin's in its Case Studies — reprinted James's work with appended contemporary and current criticism.

Although Philip Rahv remarked that James's reputation waned after its peak in the 1940s, in fact, James's reputation was maintained by a new set of academic readers: the Master joined the American literary canon, heir to Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe.