The Turn of the Century: Henry James in Millennial Fiction

Abstract

This article explores the developments in biographical and appropriative literature that enabled the proliferation of novels rewriting James’s life and works, including the postmodern scepticism towards biography as empirical fact, and the recognition that the biographical subject is discursive construct. It theorizes James’s appeal for contemporary novelists, which lies in the gaps and absences in his life, ripe for novelistic elaboration, and in the contemporaneity of subject matter, innovations in perspective, and cultural cachet of his works. It also explores how these novelistic reimaginings interact with readers’ varying foreknowledge.