Why, after a hundred years, Henry James? At a critical moment so leery of traditional notions of literary and cultural value, so impatient with gestures of authorial self-aggrandizement, so suspicious of the prerogatives of class privilege, few writers would seem less likely to survive than one thoroughly embedded in the highest of high literary culture, driven by desire for canonical status, fascinated by the intensities of the drawing room and the mores of the country house. And few bodies of work would seem less likely to thrive in our MTV-mediated age of instantaneous apprehension. The thickness, the opacity, the ambiguous range of reference of Jamesian prose demand attention, focus, and, that rarest of contemporary commodities, time.

Yet persist he has: indeed, his work has managed to attract devoted readers and inspiring commentaries across and through the major critical shifts of the last fifty years. Each successive wave of theoretical and critical practice - New Criticism, deconstruction, feminism, marxism, New Historicism - staked their claims and exemplified their style of interpretation by offering powerful re-readings of James.