Review [of Peter Rawlings\u27 \u3cem\u3eHenry James and the Abuse of the Past\u3c/em\u3e]

[...] the abuse of the past becomes in James\u27s hands an art of fiction and the framework of an autobiography (67-68). According to Rawlings, Henry James\u27s late fiction specializes in constructing, within the volatile framework of philosophies of time then current, decadent mutations of America\u27s vanishing dreamers, characters arrested . . . by the forlorn realization that \u27we shall never be again as we were!\u27 (141-42)

“Lifted Moments”: Emily Dickinson, Hymn Revision, and the Revival Music Meme-Plex

This essay focuses on Dickinson’s poem “The Soul has Bandaged moments - ” (Fr360), placing it in relation to several interrelated hymns (Independent, Unitarian, and gospel) that share a common pattern of imagery deriving from the popular “Crowning Day” motif. Through a linked sequence of paired readings, it shows how connections between two loosely related texts sharpen and become meaningful when the two texts are brought into dialog with a third text. Juxtaposing three overlapping pairs of lyrics—first by Daniel Webster Whittle and William Channing Gannett, then by Philip Doddridge and Emily Dickinson, and, finally, by Gannett and Dickinson (with a brief coda on Frances Harper)—this essay illustrates how texts that probably did not bear on one another directly may have related to one another indirectly as they worked within and responded to a shared, dynamic network (or meme-plex) of hymns that underwent constant adaptation and recombination throughout the nineteenth century

Revising Lives: Bernard Shaw and His Biographer

Shaw\u27s galley revisions of Archibald Henderson\u27s 1932 biography, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet, reveal a unique collaboration between biographer and subject. The result is a subversion of biographical conventions, in which the assumed voice of the biographer lends credence and authority to the disguised voice of the subject

Henry James Rides Again

This essay explores Henry James\u27s friendship with Alice Bartlett, a favorite companion in equestrian adventures during James\u27s 1873 residence in Rome. Reading James\u27s travel essay Roman Rides in the context of the mutual friendship of James, Bartlett, and the Emersons suggests that Bartlett profoundly influenced James, albeit in oblique, unacknowledged, and sometimes belated ways. Roman Rides, to which Bartlett provided impetus, presents a textual response to the Roman Campagna that reflects James\u27s early engagement with Emersonian Transcendentalism. This response reverberates, in transmuted form, in the fiction of the late, modern James, as revealed in the tale The Great Good Place