A Form Foredoomed to Looseness
Mazzucco-Than, Cecile
This book examines critical prose written by Henry James and a representative group of American and British novelists and critics of his era in order to reveal a subtextual debate about the gender of fiction. A close examination of the adjectives and metaphors used to describe fiction uncovers a persistent pattern linked to the socio-cultural valuation of women's work versus men's. James's prose criticism reveals the strongest pattern, but a s...