av福利社

鈥淣o one, among American writers, was more contemporary or had a more powerful grasp of American history and American myth,鈥� writes Leon Edel of Henry James. This collection of James’s essays on American letters, together with some of his miscellaneous writings on other American subjects, is a pivotal document in the reassessment of James as less cloistered—and more American—than previously supposed. James is relaxed and informal as he writes of Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, Godkin, Norton, and Howells: he is fondly recalling—but also criticizing—the cultural orthodoxy in which he was reared. The American Essays remarkably prefigures current efforts to revise and challenge the aesthetic idealism of the Emersonian tradition.