Title: Henry James's New York edition
Description: Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-9).

Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; omitting many works, among them some major novels; and breaking with his long-standing opposition to textual illustration by commissioning photographic frontispieces for each of the Edition's twenty-four volumes.

The New York Edition has long served as a cornerstone in the myth of "The Master." Yet despite the considerable critical attention devoted to James's celebrated prefaces and his revisions of his earlier work, the Edition itself has remained curiously unread. This book constitutes the first comprehensive effort to apprehend the full complexity of James's self-performance - his often ambivalent construction of self, authorship, and authority - in the New York Edition.

Removing the aura of sanctity that has grown up around James and his self-proclaimed "monument," the essays gathered here, most of them published for the first time, provide a surprisingly new portrait of James, and a significant challenge to traditional conceptions of literary authority.
Subjects: Authors and readers, Publishing, Authors and publishers, Authorship, History, Fiction, James, henry, 1843-1916, Fiction, history and criticism, Publishers, Criticism and interpretation
Places: United States, New York (State), New York
People: Henry James (1843-1916)
Time periods: 20th century