A Shaggy Beast from a Baggy Monster

摘要

A Shaggy Beast from a Baggy Monster' argues that during the first two decades of the Cold War, Henry James endowed American creative writing workshops with a set of protocols for writing and an imitable image of the professionalised novelist that served the new MFA programs well. But his popularity depended as much on his ideological attractiveness to the literary critics of the period as on his true usefulness to aspiring writers. This has led to a strange afterlife for James in the writers workshops. He is quoted and misquoted without being read, regarded as indis pensable without being imitated, and forever deferred to without being understood.