Our society revolves around the question of what is good and what is evil. We usually characterize humans as essentially malevolent or benevolent. The world contains, however, a minority of people characterized by ambiguity, a unique emotional...

Throughout Washington Square, the revelatory effects of love catalyze the heroine’s transformation against the wishes of a treacherously oppressive father. The juxtaposing development of the Doctor’s increasing inadequacy with that of Catherine’s...

The words of critics Todorov, Harvey, and Short gesture to various narrative aspects in Henry James’s short stories, including the existence of an essential secret, a dramatized consciousness, and a length and complexity of sentences. These...

“The Aspern Papers” by Henry James is about a nameless man who is willing to do anything in order to achieve his goal concerning an obsession with a writer. In the story, this nameless character who is both the narrator and the main character,...

The Real Thing was written by Henry James in 1891. According to his notebook entry on February 22, 1891, the idea for the story came in the form of an actual incident divulged by his friend George du Maurier. James juxtaposes an upper-class...

The Turn of the Screw has been read by some analysts as a straightforward ghost story and by others as a psychologically accurate – whether pre-or post-Freudian -- portrait of mental illness or repression breaking out. However enjoyable it is...

Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady presents the reader with a novel that uses literary form in an attempt to frame the life of its female protagonist; the very title – ‘Portrait’ – expresses a double meaning, referring both to the representation...

This essay examines the differences and similarities between two texts: The Venus of Ille and The Last of the Valerii. The first is a French short story written by Prosper Mérimée in 1835 and the second is short story written by Henry James in...

The American by Henry James is a masterly crafted novel that explores the differences between the American and European cultures. Through the main character, Christopher Newman, the author is able to articulate a clear and distinct criticism of...

“Aspern Papers” lies at the boundary between the Romantic period and an emerging Modernist perspective in the fin de siècle of the 19th century. Written in 1888, James’ “Aspern Papers” holds at the crux of its content a significant message...

“The Aspern Papers” by Henry James is about a nameless man who is willing to do anything in order to achieve his goal concerning an obsession with a writer. In the story, this nameless character who is both the narrator and the main character,...

Henry James’ 1903 novella, The Beast in the Jungle, has long been debated by readers and critics alike. Central to the narrative is the status and understanding (or lack thereof) of a secret, a ‘crouching beast,’ (James, 1) that haunts...

In the works of Daisy Miller and The Beast in the Jungle, author Henry James provides readers with multiple explanations as to why it is important for one to live a full life. These two novellas share many broad similarities, including central...

Henry James is considered the master of subtle psychological fiction, and in The Beast in the Jungle he demonstrates the powerful extent in which determinism can reach and bar an individual from any consideration of free will. This situation will...

Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw and his literary essay The Art of Fiction are entirely unalike in form, but contain thoroughly alike themes. Overall, a fascination with the acts of reading and writing is presented; these things are...

In his essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), Henry James writes ‘the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting’. Here, and elsewhere in his writing, James eschews the constraints of textual...

“Jamesian” is a term frequently used by literary scholars to describe the psychological assemblage of individual identity, a realization of consciousness and selfhood through knowledge and action, credited at times to both Henry James’s literary...