"No one, among American writers, was more contemporary or had a more powerful grasp of American history and American myth," writes Leon Edel of Henry James. This collection of James's essays on American letters, together with some of his miscellaneous writings on other American subjects, is a pivotal document in the reassessment of James as less cloistered--and more American--than previously supposed. James is relaxed and informal as he writes of Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, Godkin, Norton, and Howells: he is fondly recalling--but also criticizing--the cultural orthodoxy in which he was reared. The American Essays remarkably prefigures current efforts to revise and challenge the aesthetic idealism of the Emersonian tradition.
- ISBN10 0691068224
- ISBN13 9780691068220
- Publish Date 21 February 1990 (first published 21 January 1990)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 14 August 1996
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/4445.html