Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture by John Carlos Rowe (review)

Reviewed by: Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture by John Carlos Rowe Shuqin Fu John Carlos Rowe. Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. Routledge, 2023, xiv + 237 pp., £38.99 (e-Book). In his latest monograph, John Carlos Rowe, a distinguished Henry James scholar who is also the author of Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness(1976),The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984),The Other End Page E-6 Henry James (1998), and a number of other works, addresses the question of James's lasting appeal. To answer this question, Rowe strategically positions his discussion in a synchronically and diachronically interwoven network. On one hand, the reception of James is explored both in his and our times in a seemingly linear way. However, the synchronic dimension is aimed at a better comprehension of "what aspects of the Victorian era continue to shape our own times from roughly 1950 to the present" (13). Rowe explores adaptations of James's works and his relationship with popular culture in order to reveal the novelist's increasing influence in postmodern society. From these two dimensions arise the two parts of the book. Composed of four chapters, the first part, "His Times," concentrates on James's responses to the romantic heritage and cosmopolitanism in his era. In this part, Rowe discusses James's indebtedness to melodrama and sentimentalism against the background of sentimental tradition in American literature. While in chapter 1, Rowe explores James's trivialized sentimentalism and its cultural and historical underpinnings, in chapter 2, he takes "Daisy Miller" as a case study of romantic sentimentalism after the Civil War, arguing that its allusions to some of the icons of Romanticism--especially Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, who spent the summer of 1816 in the vicinity of Geneva--and to popular culture contribute to its aesthetic and moral complexity. These Romantic figures, steeped in their historical contexts, suggest an intriguing pattern in James's "Daisy Miller," especially if we read Daisy as more than simply the occasion around which the "ado" of the other characters allows them to present themselves but instead as a complex figure in her own right (55). Chapter 3 moves on to James's employment of the devices of Victorian melodrama in The Awkward Age, which is, according to Rowe, "a soap opera well in advance of the twentieth-century genre" (90). In this sense, James anticipated a new artistic form to rise in the following decades, which shows the significance of his times to ours. Departing from the sentimentalism and melodrama discussed in the previous chapters, in chapter 4 Rowe shifts to the topic of modern cosmopolitanism. He makes comparisons between James and such modernists as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wagner. Starting from James's criticism of Richard Wagner, Rowe explains the sharp contrast between James and modernists. Rowe focuses on James's references to Wagner in three of his short stories: "Adina," "Collaboration," and "The Velvet Glove," which, he argues, warn the readers against the threat of extreme nationalism. In the case of Eliot, Rowe analyzes The Waste Land and points out that "Eliot is not very American in The Waste Land; he is decidedly too English and not cosmopolitan at all" (110). Thus, James's advocacy of transnational cultural work forms a sharp contrast between him and his modernist successors. The second part, "Our Henry James," from chapters 5 to 8, centers on various adaptations and appropriations of James's work in different media, including film and literature. According to Rowe, rather than "Everyone's Henry James" or "Anyone's Henry James," "Our Henry James" should be reckoned as a "descriptive term for the variety of interpretive communities that use Henry James as a focal point to pursue their own interests and agendas" (23). The plural readership and the strategic ambiguity allow Henry James to lend himself to the various interpretations of his works. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on the cinematic connection between James's works and film to show James's influence on popular culture, especially in the postmodern era. In chapter 5, Rowe compares James...