Gert Buelens

• Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies (University of Sussex)
• Professor (Full) at Ghent University

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. Published in two volumes in 1880, Washington Square dramatises the plight of Catherine Sloper, a rich heiress, whose father, a successful doctor, identifies he...

This essay examines anthropomorphised sites and buildings in “Siena Early and Late,” which convey a spectral quality that shines through apparently resistant surfaces. The challenge to penetration is welcomed more than deplored by James. He side-steps opportunities for in-depth probing, deriving profit from submission to an overpowering sense of hi...

The modern Chinese term “zuo zhe” (author) is derived from the ancient word “zuo,” meaning to compose, to do, or to engage in – all commanding a notion of power and authority. These semantic threads collectively underpin the long-standing contention that Chinese authorship began with Confucius. Mencius (390–305 BCE) was the first person to claim th...

Any discussion of postmodernist authorship must proceed from a reasonably firm understanding of postmodernism, or at least postmodernist literature. Unfortunately, there is not much of a consensus on these concepts and their implications. Before approaching postmodernist authorship, it is therefore necessary to provide a brief overview of the most...

We now imagine ourselves to be living in an age of nearly frictionless authorship, one in which ideas – both wild and mundane – can be instantly published on a blog, in a Facebook comment, or on platforms from Reddit to Amazon that thrive on what we still awkwardly refer to as “self-published” manuscripts. Authorship – whether defined broadly as th...

Introduction to the fifth issue of Authorship .

In 1996 I published a book-length bibliographical survey of Henry James studies. It was organized around three key terms that seemed to cover a lot of work, especially of the 1980s and 1990s: style, ethics, history - and especially the intersection of the three in a new understanding of what the historical means. When asked some ten years later to...

References to literature are never far away in discourse about the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire (2002-2008). It has been compared to, amongst others, nineteenth-century Russian realism, French naturalism, and Shakespearean drama. “Dickensian” is another literary reference that frequently attached itself to The Wire in early reviews, pro...

This article proposes a performative model of authorship, based on the historical alternation between predominantly 'weak' and 'strong' author concepts and related practices of writing, publication and reading. Based on this model, we give a brief overview of the historical development of such author concepts in English literature from the Middle A...

Welcome to the first issue of the open-access online journal Authorship.

Leo Bersani’s “The Jamesian Lie” has had less of an impact than it deserves. It has often been ignored or misread. For Sharon Cameron, Bersani critiques how consciousness “betrays the social order” in James; in fact, Bersani shows how betrayal is the index of a notion of truth against which his work does battle. In “The Beast in the Clo...

Michael Chabon’s novella The Final Solution (2004), which first appeared in the Paris Review in 2003 with the subtitle A Story of Detection, lends itself to being interpreted as an allegory of man’s futile quest for understanding of the Holocaust.1 In this reading, the detective story that the novella recounts against the background of the Nazi ext...

“Owen Wingrave” has not had the most distinguished of careers. In one of the most exhaustive accounts of James’s oeuvre, S. Gorley Putt is wholly dismissive of the value of this “morbid tale,”1 which dramatizes the moral battle fought by the scion of a long line of military officers who discovers that he has a strong pacifist inclination. Summarizi...

In contemporary Jewish American fiction, the themes of immigration and resettlement take on a renewed significance. In various short stories and novels, a threefold composition—(pre-war) life in Europe, the transatlantic journey and settlement in America—serves as a starting point for the contemplation of post-war Jewish American identity. Rebecca...

Long misread as a novelist conspicuously lacking in historical consciousness, Henry James has often been viewed as detached from, and uninterested in, the social, political, and material realities of his time. As this volume demonstrates, however, James was acutely responsive not only to his era's changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, class,...

References and Suggested Reading

This essay argues that the theory of confession, even in its most recent elaboration by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), is in need of substantial revision, as the current understanding of confession as an address to the other cannot account for the new kinds of confession that are proliferating on the internet. Focusing on the...

Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots. Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to “real-world” issues such as histo...

The history of the relation between the law, norm, or rule on the one hand and what forms an exception to that rule on the other is complex and multifaceted.1 In the most general terms, one could posit that the exception is that which escapes from the rule. Thus, confronted with the strangeness of Michael K, his noncommunicativeness, his odd combin...

Henry James was not a writer of historical novels, yet the past is often intensely present in his works. As Virginia Woolf noted in her review of his memoirs, James’s “natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood” is the “mellow light which swims over the past,” and “the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time” (“Old Or...

The aim of this essay is to explore some of the strengths and limitations of current uses of the rhetorical pair metaphor-metonymy, introduced by structuralism as a fundamental bifurcation. The essay examines whether one version of a new formalism based on Judith Butler's work can reconstitute a tropological plan that offers a better roadmap to the...

In The Prison-House of Language, Fredric Jameson writes Language has of necessity recourse to indirection, to substitution: … it must replace [an] empty center of content with something else, and it does so either by saying what the content is like (metaphor), or describing its context and the contours of its absence, listing the things that border...

The focus of this paper is on The American Scene , which is found to display a deep sensitivity to the spatiality of desire and to be motivated by a complex dynamic of erotic mastery and surrender: subjects assert their self-possession in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—a force that may be human, non-human, or indete...

The Henry James Review 19.1 (1998) 17-35 The most common reading (or misreading) of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) runs somewhat as follows: John Marcher is the benighted author of his own sorry fate. Unable to see that it is up to him to bring about the major event for which he secretly feels destined, he never musters the courage...

The Henry James Review 19.2 (1998) 206-208 While this review will focus on van Oostrum's account of Henry James, the critique of the Dutch author Multatuli with which the book opens forms a good backdrop against which the discussion of James may be situated. As van Oostrum points out, Multatuli's Max Havelaar (1875), a novel that exposes the inhuma...

The Jamesian mode of writing, it has been claimed, actively works against an understanding of the way truth, history and power circulate in his texts. In this collection of essays, leading scholars of James analyse the strategies James used to address these crucial issues. Enacting History in Henry James claims that, because the type of knowledge a...

CallensJohan (ed.), American literature and the Arts (Brussels: VUBPress, 1991, BEF 795). Pp. 127. ISBN 90 70289 83 0. CallensJohan (ed.), Re-Discoveries of America: The Meeting of Cultures (Brussels: VUBPress, 1993, BEF 595). Pp. 175. ISBN 90 5487 050 8. - Volume 29 Issue 2 - Gert Buelens

PinskerSanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish Fiction (Rev. edn., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, $29.95). Pp. 199. ISBN 0 8093 1581 5. - Volume 27 Issue 2 - Gert Buelens

Marcus Ravage’s An American in the Making : The Making and Remaking of Man In his autobiography An American in the Making : The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917), Marcus Ravage has created a protagonist who possesses a modern, rounded character and is constantly making and remaking himself The text presents assimilation not as the necessary adjustm...

ShechnerMark, The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990, £35). Pp. 204. ISBN 0 333 485890. - Volume 25 Issue 3 - Gert Buelens