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Introduction

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Henry James in Contemporary Fiction

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Abstract

Layne introduces the extraordinary proliferation of novels based on Henry James’s life and texts written between 2001 and 2016, the centenary of his death. She articulates the developments in biographical and adaptive writing that enabled millennial writers to engage so explicitly with James, locates the sources of his appeal for novelists working in these modes and explores the different forms that their engagement has taken. The emergence of biofiction is discussed in relation to the postmodern scepticism towards biography as empirical fact, and the recognition that its subject is an illusion constructed in language. Appropriation is then discussed in relation to associated terms, such as adaptation, allusion and pastiche, and ultimately defined as a sustained engagement with a single text in the same media.

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  1. De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

    Bethany Layne

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Layne, B. (2020). Introduction. In: Henry James in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31650-1_1

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