WHEN THE MASTER RELENTS: THE NEGLECTED SHORT FICTIONS OF HENRY JAMES (GLASSES, LIAR, THIRD)

The figure of The Master haunts our reading of Henry James. Distilled from biographical particulars, bolstered by James's own pronouncements and perpetuated by several generations of critics, it is The Master who both ratifies and co-opts the determination of which works will be selected for inclusion in the Jamesian canon. This dissertation, however, takes as its object six of James's short fictions--"A Bundle of Letters," "Glasses," "The Liar," "The Tree of Knowledge," "The Third Person," and "Collaboration"--which are manifestly not a part of that canon. It proceeds through a series of close readings, with particular attention to the powerful mechanisms of humor and irony, and to the difficulties of various narrative modes. What emerges is the possibility that, at least in a segment of James's productions, a very different and contrary relation to the notion of "mastery" is implied. This study also comments upon the intertextual relationships between these fictions and several of James's other works, especially the Notebooks, and offers some reflections on the problem of canon formation in general.