A Complex Fate

Communities of Honor and Love in Henry James

Here is a study of the essential Henry James, a study that delineates the development of his imagination, not in a strictly chronological way but by isolating patterns that can be applied to his work as a whole. Manfred Mackenzie analyzes James’s social imagination, examining the kind of society and social structure he tended to portray and the motivations of his characters. The experience of exposure, the author argues, is met with everywhere in James: identity and honor sought, won, or lost. Secrecy, or the use of secrecy in conspiracy, is a reaction to exposure, and cabal and conspiracy are consistently an element in the protagonists’ quests. As James matured, however, he seemed to realize that identity and honor are ambiguous, and ultimately dehumanizing; a different set of values was needed. Mackenzie argues that a final plane of experience steadily emerges in James’s work, that of love as manifested in the capacity to sacrifice identity and honor.

The Complex Fate. Hawthorne, Henry James and some other American writers ... With an introduction and two interpolations by F. R. Leavis

Ralph Ellison and the Politics of the Novel

In this engaging study, H. William Rice illuminates the mystery that is Ralph Ellison: the author of one complex, important novel who failed to complete his second; a black intellectual who remained notably reticent on political issues during the desegregation of his native South. Rice reads both Invisible Man and the posthumously published Juneteenth as novels that focus on the political uses of language. He explores Ellison's concept of the novel, promulgated in that author's two collections of essays, as an inherently political form of art. And he carefully considers the political context that undoubtedly impacted Ellison's work and thought: a world and a time rocked to its foundation by such revolutionary actors as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Rice guides his reader to a greater understanding of Ralph Ellison, his oeuvre, and the American novel.