"The new study of James draws on novels and short stories from throughout his career to discuss James's importance as a theorist of the novel and to argue his importance as an American. It sees in the folds of James's prose different ways of creating an extra space in which something uncanny, something haunted, in nineteenth-century American history can be located. This space can be used to conceal what James said Hawthorne was fascinated by - "the interest behind the interest"." "Drawing on narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and recent work on gender, and driven by the sense that James needs to be seen as a cultural comparativist, this book situates James in relation to American and European writers such as Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, and Zola. James emerges as a complex figure marked by psychic mutilation, and even hysteria, and by an ambivalent reaction to "modernity" on which he writes so much. The book gives to the newcomer to James a comprehensive introduction, and for those who know James well it provides a new set of commanding arguments for re-reading and re-situating the work."--Jacket.