Great Short Novels of Henry James: Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, The Beast in the Jungle, The Aspern Papers, The Pupil, Lady Barberina, The ... An International Episode, Madame de Mauves
(Henry James was one of the greatest and most prolific Ame...)
Henry James was one of the greatest and most prolific American authors ever to have lived.
Henry James believed that the short novel was the perfect literary form, and his achievements here brilliantly display his mastery of it. Noted literary critic Philip Rahv has collected ten of James’s most important short novels to make one distinguished volume. Accompanied by Rahv’s informative commentary and keen insights, this collection contains the following classics:
MADAME DE MAUVES
DAISY MILLER
AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE
THE SIEGE OF LONDON
LADY BARBERINA
THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO
THE ASPERN PAPERS
THE PUPIL
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
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The Partisan Reader Ten Years of Partisan Review 1934-1944: An Anthology
(Selections from the first ten years of one of the most si...)
Selections from the first ten years of one of the most significant cultural literary journals published in the United States, with an Introduction by Lionel Trilling. CONTENTS: Introduction; In Retrospect; A Group of Stories; Selected Poems; Interpretations; Variety. xvi + 688 pages. *** See accompanying scan images of the Table of Contents.
Philip Rahv was an American literary critic and essayist.
Background
Philip Rahv was born Ivan Greenberg on March 10, 1908 in Kupin, Ukraine, in czarist Russia. His parents operated a dry goods store but, amid the turmoil of World War I and anti-Semitic pogroms, emigrated to Palestine, where their son would himself live twice briefly. In 1922, at the age of fourteen, he immigrated to Providence, Rhode Island, and then to Oregon.
Education
Philip attended the gymnasium.
Career
At the age of sixteen, he left high school, becoming an autodidact and a radical who sought the abolition of capitalism. Upon joining the Communist party in 1932, he adopted the name that would soon signal his fame as a literary critic and editor. In the depths of the Great Depression, he moved to New York City, living in wrenching poverty and sometimes teaching Hebrew.
Starting out in the 1930's under the literary sponsorship of the Communist party, Rahv published essays, reviews, and poems in the Daily Worker, New Masses, and Prolit. He also joined William Phillips, the son of Jewish immigrants, in cofounding Partisan Review in 1934, under the auspices of the Communists' New York City John Reed Club. The magazine was designed to defend the interests of the Soviet Union, to intensify opposition to fascism and Nazism, and to clarify the aims and methods of a proletarian or "revolutionary" literature. But the switch in the Communists' political strategy toward the popular front, as well as the shocks of the Moscow Purge trials in exposing Stalinist cruelty and cynicism, prompted the coeditors to halt publication in the fall of 1936.
When Partisan Review resumed its operations in 1937, it had become independent, and Rahv had become a vigorous anti-Communist. Instead of defending the socialist motherland, the monthly, then bimonthly, magazine defended the modernist achievements of writers like Eliot (an Anglican arch-conservative), Proust, Mann, Yeats, and Joyce. Instead of supporting a literature that would reflect the perspective of the working class, Partisan Review promoted a cosmopolitanism that embraced an apolitical spirit and revealed an alienation from bourgeois culture. The magazine soon became one of the most prestigious forums for the intelligentsia in the Western world. Although its subscription list did not exceed 10, 000 at the peak of its influence, Partisan Review attracted contributions from leading literati in the United States and western Europe and became required reading for intellectuals. The excitement that the journal conveyed declined by the 1950's, however, as its anti-Stalinism became orthodoxy and as modernism triumphed in the academy.
Rahv remained coeditor and, by virtually all accounts, the journal's dominant voice until 1969, when he resigned to found Modern Occasions. Inaugurated the following year, the Boston-based quarterly represented somewhat radical politics but also upheld what had then become fairly traditional literary tastes. Failing to find a large enough audience to meet costs, the journal ceased publication after six issues. Commanding as Rahv's stewardship of Partisan Review had been, the literary criticism that he published, often within its pages, might be deemed even more significant. In particular a series of critical performances at the end of the so-called red decade established Rahv's reputation for brilliance.
"The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K. " (1940) provided the first influential interpretation of Kafka in the United States and made the case for Kafka's uniting of "the realistic and symbolic, the recognizable and mysterious. " "Dostoevsky and Politics" (1938) was also authoritative, as were several of his subsequent essays on the Russian novelist.
He may be best known for his portraits of Hawthorne and James and for his generalizations about American fiction and poetry. Two essays in particular helped shape the critical appreciation of the literature of his adopted country.
"The Cult of Experience in American Writing" (1940) noted the failure of American writers to explore serious ideas in prose or to fashion intellectuals as fictional characters. In "Paleface and Redskin" (1939), Rahv lamented the polarity and fragmentation of the creative mind and showed how wide a chasm separated, say, the patrician Henry James and Emily Dickinson from the plebeian Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. And no other piece of criticism identified more concisely the sterility of the socially conscious writing that Rahv once championed than his "Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy" (1939), which assailed the Communist party for recognizing no boundaries between politics and art. While his own stance remained vaguely leftist, Rahv was no activist ready to leap to the barricades. His Marxism was subdued, revealed most often in his effort to locate writers in their historical and ideological contexts. After a lifetime of disdain for the academy, he became a professor of English at Brandeis University in 1957 and served on its faculty until his death sixteen years later.
Rahv himself was a troubled, brooding figure whose scowl made him look, in the words of one associate, like the permanent "chairman of a grievance committee. " So flamboyant was his personality that Phillips called him "manicimpressive. "
Rahv's life was entwined in paradox: the formidable literary arbiter who had never even graduated from high school, the exuberant champion of experimental modernism who disparaged the highbrow articles published in his own magazine, the ornery bully of the editorial office who shrank from the political challenges that his own revolutionist views ought to have dictated, the independent and detached cosmopolitan who read his favorite French, German, and Russian authors in their own languages but who bequeathed his estate to the state of Israel. An essayist rather than a thinker, Rahv had little flair for theory or for sustained scholarship. Perhaps no significant critic left behind so thin a body of work. His fame rests on a lifetime's output that was stretched into four overlapping essay collections; a long-promised book on Dostoyevski was left unfinished at the time of his death in Cambridge, Massachussets.
Rahv spoke with a thick eastern European accent, and Yiddish had been his mother tongue, but his English prose was subtle, elegant, and even exquisite.
Connections
Childless, Rahv had three wives. He and Nathalie Swan, an architect, were married in 1940, and were divorced in 1955. The next year he married Theodora Jay Stillman, who, while smoking in bed, died in a fire in their Boston home in 1968. Marriage to Betty Thomas McIlvain, a writer, followed a couple of years later.