ALTHOUGH SOME OF JAMES'S contemporary critics deemed him just short of a great writer, history has elevated Henry James to indisputable preeminence in the American canon. Even before Leon Edel underscored the epithet “The Master” in his multi-volume biography (the first volume appeared in 1953), James was the novelist with whom every major American critic grappled. Van Wyck Brooks, Richard Blackmur, F. O. Matthiessen, F. W. Dupee, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson: these writers and hundreds more had their say about the works of Henry James. In the second half of the twentieth century and into our own time, this attention has multiplied; in the kaleidoscopic world of literary scholarship, James has been considered from myriad critical vantage points. This volume in the Literary Criticism in Perspective series examines the trajectory of writings about James, beginning with responses to James's works in the newspapers and magazines of his time and ending with an examination of the current critical focus on sexuality and gender, morality, and the nature of consciousness.

“To criticise,” James wrote in his preface to What Maisie Knew, “is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised thing and make it one's own” (Blackmur 155).