/lit/ - Literature

Inb4 DFW.

James has generated the largest number of scholarly articles in the past 25 years.

>http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/26/mla-rankings/

If you think his late style was unnecessarily stuffy you can find a 24 page defense of it by way of a Cambridge style dissection of the first paragraph of the Ambassadors.

>http://www.thenation.com/article/170785/masters-servants-henry-james#

>Herford pointed out that a famous essay by onetime Cambridge student Ian Watt, “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication” (1960), begins with a consideration of the uses of Cambridge-style practical criticism. Watt, for his part, noted that practical criticism is “better suited to verse than to prose,” and then launched into a twenty-four page explication of 256 of James’s words. He wanted to continue the Leavis tradition of approaching James as a poet, but also to mount a defense of James’s late style against Leavis, who celebrated The Bostonians and The Portrait of a Lady but pronounced The Ambassadors a “bad” book. Watt argued, and tried to show, that “all or at least nearly all” of James’s “idiosyncrasies of diction or syntax…are fully justified by the particular emphases they create.”