Henry James
Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition

"Also, we realize, James possessed a point of view tailor-made for the vocation of literary criticism. The critic's life, he wrote in one essay, 'is heroic, for it is immensely vicarious. He has to understand for others.'"—The New York Times

Save 30% when you buy both volumes of Henry James's literary criticism!

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.

The collection attests to James's nearly unparalleled creative energy and to the reach of his theoretical and interpretive curiosity. His unique authority as a commentator draws upon the European-American contrast that is a central circumstance of his own fiction. A member of intellectual circles on both continents, he became the foremost interpreter to American readers of the literary and cultural life of Europe.

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 Honoré 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, Théophile 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.

Leon Edel (1907-1997), volume editor, was emeritus professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. His five-volume biography of Henry James received both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Mark Wilson, associate editor of this volume, was professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Also by Henry James:
Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America
Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
Complete Stories 1864–1874
Complete Stories 1874–1884
Complete Stories 1884–1891
Complete Stories 1892–1898
Complete Stories 1898–1910
Complete Stories (5 volumes)
Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers & English Writers
Novels 1871–1880
Novels 1881–1886
Novels 1886–1890
Novels 1896–1899
Novels 1901–1902

Also Available:
Henry James Poster
Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews

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