Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship

In this sprightly study, the posthumous battle over the Henry James’s legacy makes for a revealing tempest in a teapot. Penn State English prof Anesko, general editor of the forthcoming Complete Fiction of Henry James, narrates the decades-long struggle following the writer’s death in 1916 to control his manuscripts, letters, and public image, a free-for-all motivated, says Anesko, by seething social anxieties and professional jealousies. Involved in the fracas were James’s family, who, fearing scandalous personal revelations—his homoerotic letters were a minefield—tried to sequester his papers at Harvard; Edith Wharton and other literati who pushed for an unexpurgated airing of his life; critics who derided James as a deracinated Anglophile mandarin; defenders who celebrated him as a modernist master of form; and cunning James biographer Leon Edel, who used his rapport with James’s heirs to gain a monopoly of access to his papers, thus denying them to a generation of scholars. Anesko’s lively, gossipy account invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital” to explain the scrimmage over James’s literary cachet. But with its delicate power plays, genteel opportunism, and sly, exquisitely shaded portrait of rarefied social circles aswirl in tiny traumas over taste and reputation, it’s a Jamesian tale in its own right. Photos. (Jan.)