Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

This publication traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last 25 years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction.

"Notes of a Son and Brother" is the autobiography of American born British author, Henry James. James is a recipient of the Order of Merit and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. Though born in New York, his family moved frequently throughout Europe as his father Henry James Sr. pursued a publishing career. He begins with their stay in the French-Swiss border, where his parents had moved for his and his sibling's schooling. James observes that, "I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too attentively..."

"For other novelists the value of Henry James's Notebooks is immense and to brood over them a major experience. The glow of the great impresario is on the pages. They are occasionally readable and endlessly stimulating, often moving and are ocasionally relieved by a drop of gossip."—V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman "The Notebooks take us into his study, and here we can observe him, at last, in the very act of creation at his writing table."—Leon Edel, Atlantic Monthly "A document of prime importance."—Edmund Wilson, New Yorker

Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity aims to advance the field of studies on the life and work of Henry James by fully exploring the author’s use of duplicity, one of the key literary and rhetorical strategies within the author’s vast and infamous arsenal of techniques of ‘ambiguity’. The collection brings together essays by both long established and more recent Jamesian scholars from eleven different countries, the collective work of whom, through this publication, further enhances our grasp of the ever-elusive literary style of Henry James. The prefatory section of this volume provides a general overview of the myriad uses of ‘duplicity’ in the writings of Henry James. The collected essays are then divided into five sections, each providing an in-depth study of a particular use of duplicity as a rhetorical strategy. The first three sections focus on duplicitous devices employed within James’s works of fiction – including the author’s often underhanded use of undisclosed literary sources (‘Duplicitous Subtexts’), his staging of characters who rely on subterfuge and outright lying (‘Duplicitous Characters’), and his creation of doubles and doppelgängers – another key connotation of the term ‘duplicity’ – both within a single work and throughout his literary career (‘Duplicitous Representation’). The two final sections then focus the poetics of duplicity employed in works of non-fiction by James, including his autobiographies and his reviews of other authors, as well as in his personal writings and correspondence. This includes James’s guileful use of duplicity in his representation of himself, particular attention being paid to James’s late works of self-assessment (‘Duplicitous Self-Representation’), as well as in his assessments of other writers in his reviews or of certain places in his travel writing (‘Duplicitous Judgements’). Henry James and the Poetics of Duplicity would thus be a great asset to scholars of James at all levels, from the student grappling with James’s literary sleight of hand for the first time, to specialists in the field of James who have long studied the masterful art of James’s literary trickery.