Henry James's last romance

In this major new study of Henry James's classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past. In this record of his 1904-5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralyzing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between "natives" and "aliens," between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Although James has been represented as conservative by liberal critics, it is just such simplifying oppositions that his method of interpretation works to transform.

Haviland's own metonymical method follows James's interpretative practice by bringing historical and theoretical readings of these texts into conversation with each other.