Our Henry James

Our Henry James addresses the interesting revival of Henry James's works in Anglo-American film adaptations and contemporary fiction from the 1960s to the present. James's fiction is generally considered difficult and part of high culture, more appropriate for classroom study than popular appreciation. However, this volume focuses on the adaptation of his novels, including some of his most complex, into films, challenging us to understand James's popular reputation today on both sides of the Atlantic. The book offers two explanations for his persistent influence: James's literary ambiguity and his reliance on popular culture. Part I: His Times considers James's reliance on sentimental literature and theatrical melodrama in Daisy Miller, Guy Domville, The Awkward Age, and several of his lesser-known short stories (Adina, Collaboration, The Velvet Glove). Sentimentalism and melodrama were particularly concerned with changing gender roles and sexual identity in James's era, albeit not always in progressive ways. Part II: Our Times focuses on how James's considerations of these changing gender roles and sexual identities have influenced such Hollywood representations of emancipated women as Hitchcock's Rear Window, Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, Daisy Miller, and They All Laughed, and films adaptations of James's novels in the 1990s. Recent fiction by James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Cynthia Ozick, and Colm Tóibín also treat Jamesian notions of gender and sexuality while considering his part in contemporary debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both a study of James's works and a broad range of contemporary film and fiction, Our Henry James demonstrates the continuing relevance of Henry James to our multimedia, interdisciplinary, globalized culture.