"Often overlooked by modern critics, The Reverberator was a departure from Henry James' immediately preceding novels, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, returning to the popular 'international theme' of his earlier fiction. Its comedy of manners explores the conflicting values of American and Europeanized characters in the context of topical cultural concerns. Most notably, in its satire on popular journalism and an emerging mass-media through the scandal sheet 'The Reverberator', the novel dramatizes what James presciently saw as the 'devouring publicity' of modern life. This edition, based on the most reliable of the work's first book appearances (Macmillan, 1888), provides a thorough account of the novel's sources and composition, literary and historical contexts, and extensive revision for the New York Edition (1908), as well as extensive annotation. It will be of interest to James scholars, students of nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature and culture, and historians of journalism and new media"--
"This edition aims to represent James's fictional career as it evolves, with a fresh and expanded sense of its changing contexts and an informed sense of his developing style, technique and concerns. Consequently it does not attempt to base its choices on the principle of the 'last lifetime edition', which in the case of Henry James is monumentally embodied in the twenty-four volumes of the NYE, the author's selection of nine longer novels (six of them in two volumes) and fifty-eight shorter novels and tales, and including eighteen specially composed Prefaces. The CFHJ, as a general rule, adopts rather the text of the first published book edition of a work, unless the intrinsic particularities and the publishing history of that work require an alternative choice, on the ground that emphasis on the first context in which it was written and read will permit an unprecedented fullness of attention to the transformations in James's writing over five decades, as well as the rich literary and social contexts oftheir original publication"--
Scholarly edition of Henry James' short comic novel about scandal in Paris, featuring a complete and comprehensive scholarly apparatus.
