Kirjahaku

This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist tradition of Austen, George Eliot, Flauberty and Balzac, and a decisive step towards the experimental modernism of Woolf and T.S. Eliot. His works often focus upon an innocent American in Europe, and assess the qualities and dangers of both American and European culture at the time, as well as showing their vast differences.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Henry James presents here a revision of his Literary Biography expanded with six further essays illuminating what he calls the New Biography—an approach that draws on the resources of psychoanalysis, the biographer’s own subjectivity, and the skills of the novelist. Mr. Edel includes a history of the art of biography since Boswell, criticism of some of the best-known biographers, advice for the biographer on documentation and the use of psychological theory, and a discussion of what Edel calls the supreme problem in biography—transference, the life-writer’s emotional involvement with his or her subject.