ABSTRACT
Why read James, Trilling, and Booth? The answer may not be immediately obvious. Writing from the 1860s and through to the early twentieth century, Henry James (1843-1916) is most widely renowned for works such as The Wings of the Dove (1902b), The Golden Bowl (1904), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and his ghost story, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). But he also published ground-breaking prefaces to his own fiction and numerous critical essays. Lionel Trilling (1905-75) became well known as a literary critic in a 1950s academic scene dominated by, as we shall see, the ‘New Criticism’ of earlier decades. The academic career of Wayne C. Booth (1921-2005), on the other hand, has spanned the later twentieth-century transformation of literary ‘criticism’ into the myriad new approaches known as literary ‘theory’.
