Introduction and Notes by Ian F.A. Bell, Professor of English Literature, University of Keele. Washington Square marks the culmination of James's apprentice period as a novelist. With sharply focused attention upon just four principal characters, James provides an acute analysis of middle-class manners and behaviour in the New York of the 1870's, a period of great change in the life of the city. This change is explored through the device of setting the novel's action during the 1840s, similarly a period of considerable turbulence as the United States experienced the onset of rapid commercial and industrial expansion. Through the relationships between Austin Sloper, a celebrated physician, and his sister Lavinia Penniman, his daughter Catherine, and Catherine's suitor, Morris Townsend, James observes the contemporary scene as a site of competing styles and performances where authentic expression cannot be articulated or is subject to suppression.

First published in 1981, Critic as Scientist provides a detailed and scholarly account both of the scientific background and of contemporary artistic issues in its analysis of Ezra Pound’s poetics. During the crucial period of his years in London, Ezra Pound was striving to formulate not only a new system of poetics but also a new language through which he could both define the critic’s procedure and announce his modernity. It was in science that Pound discovered the vocabulary that became his most characteristic gesture during the literary crises of the time. The use of scientific terminology in his ‘propaganda’ for a new ‘renaissance’ belonged, initially, to specifically American modes of aesthetic tradition, as typified by Whistler and aspects of New England transcendentalism. A consideration of popular versions of physics and biology, and of the ‘scientific attitude’ displayed by such contemporaries as Fenollosa, Hulme, Ford and Eliot, reveals that the major terms and practices of Pound’s critical vocabulary were located in the issues of nineteenth and early twentieth-century science. The author has sought to demystify key words in the Poundian vocabulary and has suggested a wider literary and cultural context for the study of Pound’s aesthetic theory. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

An examination of the work of Henry James. Topics covered range from commodity and style in "Washington Square", to the peculiarity of social life in "The Bostonians". Other works by the author include "Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading" and "Henry James's Fiction as History".

In this collection of essays, a number of critics offer commentary on the crime fiction genre, exploring the kinds of pleasure it offers. Looking under the attractive surface of these books, the contributors discover a number of complex issues.

The late Tony Tanner was one of the most distinctive and distinguished critical voices on American literature. With a foreword by Edward Said and an introduction by Ian Bell, which place Tanner's work in the larger context of critical approaches to American literature and culture, this book brings together Tanner's essays on a wide range of key American authors. Exploring writers as diverse as Melville, Emerson, Henry James, DeLillo and Pynchon, it offers an introduction to the major figures and themes in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature.