LIBRARY NOTES
 
R. W. B. Lewis
The Fiction of Henry James
Wednesday, December 3, 1997 at 5:30 PM
Members' Room; $60 per person
The status of most American fiction writers tends to change radically from age to age, and never more visibly so than in our own time of canon-smashing and canon-making. But the status of Henry James, on the whole, has stood singularly firm, and as we read and discuss some of his key writings, we might ask ourselves why.
We will consider Jamesian works written by over about twenty years. On December 3, 1997 we will talk about
The Portrait of a Lady of 1881. James's first full-scale artistic and critical success; a novel of richly textured social reality, and one written in a relatively straightforward way.
Henry James was also a genuine master of the shorter fictional form, and on December 10, 1997 we will look at two of his finest novellas:
The Aspern Papers of 1887, among other things a narrative expression of James's deepening concern with the nature and role of the literary artist; and
The Turn of the Screw of 1899, the classic tale of demonic possession or of sexual hysteria -- we will try to determine which.
In the early 1900s, James, approaching sixty, entered what later critics have called his "major phase". Of the three works that constitute this phase, on December 17, 1997 we will be discussing
The Wings of the Dove of 1902 -- quite frankly my own favorite in the James oeuvre, and a novel that moves with extraordinary grace from the realistic towards the mythic; from the here-and-now of erotic intrigue and material ambition to fleeting glimpses of the terrible drift of modern history.
Henry James will grow and change and develop over these two decades, but a constant Jamesian presence will be palpable throughout, and one of our tasks will be to identify it.
Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale, R.W.B. Lewis is the author of
The American Adam (on 19th century literature),
Edith Wharton: A Biography, and
The Jameses: A Family Narrative. His most recent book (1995) is
The City of Florence: Historical Vistas and Personal Sightings.
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