CALL FOR PAPERS

The Henry James Society

Modern Language Association Convention

Toronto

8-11 January 2026

The Henry James Society invites proposals for the following panel. 

James on James

Oliver Herford’s magisterial edition of the Prefaces for Cambridge University Press last year is a timely reminder that James’s commentary on his own work has proved almost as central to literary history as the novels and tales themselves.  But the Prefaces are far from the only place in which James engages in self-reflection, nor is that reflection limited to his published work. Together with his notebooks and letters, they also constitute an informal autobiography, to be read alongside his more formal ventures in the genre, like A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother. As the very titles of the latter volumes also testify, “James on James” is a rubric that extends well beyond Henry Jr.’s reflections on himself—and he is far from the only James to participate in the practice.  We invite papers that take the rubric as the starting point for a variety of approaches to Jamesian self-reflection, as well as to individual family members’ seemingly endless capacity to comment on and analyze one another.  Possibilities include:

• Henry James’s criticism of his own work in the Prefaces, notebooks, letters, essays, reviews, or other occasional pieces
• Henry James as autobiographer in A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years
• Henry James as autobiographer in the Prefaces, notebooks, letters, or travel writing, from early essays on Italy to The American Scene
• Aspects of self-reflection in James’s fiction
• Henry James as reviser or editor of his own work
• Henry James’s critical writing as insight into his own aims as a fiction writer
• Henry James on other members of the James family in A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, letters, or elsewhere
• William James as autobiographer in his letters or in published work such as Varieties of Religious Experience
• William James as a critic of Henry Jr.’s work in letters or elsewhere
• William James on other members of the James family in his letters
• Alice James as autobiographer in the diary or her letters 
• Alice James on other members of the James family in her diary or letters
• Alice James as a critic of Henry Jr.’s work (or of William’s or Henry Sr.’s) in her diary or letters
• Other members of the James family—Henry Sr., Mary James, Aunt Kate, Robertson, Wilkie, William’s children—on themselves or one another and / or as critics or editors of the published work of any member(s) of the family

Please send 300-word abstract and brief bio to Ruth Bernard Yeazell <ruth.yeazell@yale.edu> and Sarah Wadsworth <sarah.wadsworth@marquette.edu > by Friday, 7 March 2025.