The Europeans by Henry James (The Cambridge Edition of the Complete by Henry James and Susan ,M )

ISBN: 9781107004030

Cambridge University Press , Spetember 2015 

284 pages , Hardback 

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. James's The Europeans gently satirizes both early nineteenth-century New England society and the sophisticated visiting Europeans who encounter it. While this wryly comic novel has had its critical champions - F. R. Leavis and Richard Poirier among them - it has not previously received the scholarly attention it deserves. This edition, based on the work's first book appearance (Macmillan, 1878), reconstructs the novel's literary, cultural and historical contexts, provides extensive annotation, and gives a detailed textual history of the work, drawing on newly available James letters. It will be of interest to James scholars, book historians and students of nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature and culture, and will also re-introduce readers to the pleasures of Henry James's early style.

• The first scholarly edition of a wryly comic novel addressing the complex relationship between people and ideas of the Old World and the New, a theme which would be key through James' career as a writer
• Offers an authoritative text, traces the various versions of the work through James' lifetime, and situates the story within its literary, cultural and historical context partly through use of newly available James letters
• One of the first volumes in the new Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, to be published in 34 volumes