Publisher's Synopsis
The equivocal endings of these texts have occasioned a debate among critics and have led to both high praise and charges of ambivalence.;In this study, the author begins by summarizing the century-long debate among James's readers, looking particularly at the various schools of literary criticism - source studies, textual criticism, technical and structural approaches and new critical as well as post-new critical readings.;In the second half of the book, he offers the perspective of a genre critic, arguing that, though James himself probably would not have chosen the term, it may prove helpful to think of him as a writer of melodrama. In doing so, the author observes that many of the attributes of James's fictions that permit them to be read as melodramas also lend themselves to deconstructive or reader-response interpretations.
