The Prefaces (The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James)

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 wrote the eighteen Prefaces included in this volume to accompany the revised, selective New York Edition of his novels and tales (1907–9). They are unique and various writings: at once a digest of James's critical principles, an unsystematic treatise on fiction theory, an account of his rereading and revision of his own work, an oblique autobiography of the writing life and a public performance of authorial identity. This is the first scholarly edition of the Prefaces, and includes a detailed contextual introduction, a full textual history and extensive explanatory notes. It will be of value to researchers, scholars and advanced students of Henry James, and of 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature and book history.

Oliver Herford is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Henry James's Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 (2016) and a past president of the Henry James Society. He has published widely on James in journals and edited collections – on topics including his reading of Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac, his allusive style and his practice of commemoration – and has also published on life-writing and letter-writing in the circle of John Keats.