...Rosetta Young “‘How nicely you talk; I love to hear you’: Speech as Cultural Capital in Emma , Middlemarch , and The Portrait of a Lady ” (pp. 286–315) In this essay, I examine how, in Emma , Middlemarch , and The Portrait of a Lady , Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James craft heroines who...

...Shari Goldberg Shari Goldberg, “Henry James’s Black Dresses: Mourning without Grief” (pp. 515–538) While scholars have carefully discerned how nineteenth-century modes of mourning differ from Sigmund Freud’s later model, the distinction between mourning and grief, in texts of the period and beyond...

...Matthew Flaherty Matthew Flaherty, “Henry James at the Ethical Turn: Vivification and Ironization in The Ambassadors ” (pp. 366–393) Taking its cue from recent work by Dorothy J. Hale, this paper begins by exploring the extent to which Levinasian, deconstructive, and Aristotelian critical...

...Patrick Fessenbecker Patrick Fessenbecker, "Freedom, Self-Obligation, and Selfhood in Henry James" (pp. 69–95) In this essay I argue for a new interpretation of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1880–81, revised 1908). After briefly surveying the history of interpretations of the novel, I argue...

...Katherine Mullin This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early...

...Stuart Burrows This essay examines the servants and shopkeepers who play a surprisingly central yet critically unacknowledged role in Henry James's fiction of the late 1890s, arguing that James's frequent depiction of lower-class life is a sign not of an unsuspected interest in class but of his...