HENRY JAMES: Writing as Revenge
We are seeking essay submissions pertaining to Henry James’s early stories and criticism, to be published by Vernon press. The working title of the collection is Writing as Revenge. We define James’s “early period” as anything he wrote up to The Portrait of a Lady. Please submit an abstract by October 31, 2024.
Most of the current scholarship on James focuses on his mature or late novels and stories, reading them from a cognitive perspective. As John Carlos Rowe explains in his recent study (Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture, 2023), mainstream Anglo-American criticism has attributed cognitive function to literature since New Criticism. Specifically, it has transformed Jamesian narratives into philosophy and cognitive analyses. However, topics like consciousness, subjectivity, aesthetics have by now become overused and accumulated a dust of staleness.
The cognitive approach has created a bias against James’s early writing. When at 20 James devoted himself to the muse of writing, he churned out stories and reviews for magazines to get paid. The heavy-weights of American criticism often dismissed his early writing attempts as silly and jejune. In our volume, we propose to re-read James’s early stories and examine his vibrant writing, in which he encapsulated his ideas about language, literature and society of his day.
We want to think about James’s early writing as writing of revenge – not in revenge against something specific but writing as a vision against complacent society and rampant egoism, against self-serving cynicism and distrust. How James used language to write himself out of the pressure of circumstance and predicament is what we hope to explore.
If in “Adina” James proves that love at first sight can be a revenge on calculated pragmatism, then in Washington Square, he takes revenge on the stagnating, dehumanized world of America itself. In Madame de Mauves, a young woman stages a personal revenge by indifference when she refuses to participate in a romantic plot that society expects of her.
Without getting into deep analytical speculations that remove the reader from James’s sensual writing, we propose to read James as an explorer of interior processes of thought and feeling, as shaped by social and intersubjective relations.
Please submit your 300-word abstract by October 31st to: kshloznikova@loyola.edu