In the opening preface to the New York Edition of his fiction, James famously wrote: “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so. . . . The prime effect of so sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on and on; while the fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly-appointed stopping-place.”
James’s problem of the artist is also the problem of scholarship: Finding a “convenient . . . stopping-place” that also leads readers “on and on” in their own work and thinking too.
This forum issue of the Henry James Review seeks shorter studies/longer notes (1000 words) to longer articles (12,500 words) on such “stopping-place[s]”--topics related to Henry James’s literary biography, fiction, criticism, travel writing, plays--and their relation to the literary world in Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and/or elsewhere from shortly before James’s birth in 1843 to shortly after his death in 1916.
New approaches to Henry James biography, narrative, archival work, data collection, genre, readership/criticism, publication, or professionalism in relation to the nineteenth-century literary world are of special interest.
Contributions should be produced according to MLA style (8th edition) and sent electronically to hjamesr@creighton.edu. Please identify your manuscript as a Forum 2021 submission.
Deadline: March 1, 2021.