ABSTRACT
What, for Henry James, was illusion? Why should the consideration of illusion be important to a reading of his work? What place, however buried, resisted or partial, could illusion have in the many critical agendas and practices which circulate today? This book does not set out to provide answers to these questions but it does set out to read Henry James informed by them. They provide a context for a journey through some of James's work from The Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl, and slightly beyond. Many books have been written on James which take a similar route and many continue to be written.2 To pretend to add to their number on grounds of utter originality would be, at the very least, a mistake. Rather the very existence of so much work on James and, in a small way, the existence of this book provide reiterative evidence that James is a writer whose cultural impact has been enormous, a writer who is never totally absent from the practice of teaching and writing about literary texts even when those practices do not explicitly concern him, and one who is certainly never far away when those practices are evaluated and debated.
