The Sacred Fount

The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James provides, for the first time, a scholarly edition of a major writer whose work continues to be read, quoted, adapted and studied. One of James's strangest works, The Sacred Fount, explores ideas of sexual desire and power in an English country house setting. The novel aroused considerable critical bewilderment and hostility on its original publication in 1901 but was retrieved by a subsequent generation of critics who found its ambiguity and stylistic elaboration an instance of James's 'mastery' and an early example of literary modernism. This is the first critical edition of James' landmark text and is supported by a full critical apparatus including introduction, notes, glossary, textual variants and bibliography. The volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars and advanced students of Henry James, and of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American fiction and literature.

• Provides a full critical introduction to The Sacred Fount, comprising an authoritative text and supported by full textual apparatus including notes, glossary and textual variants
• Based on original archival research, this edition will enable future researchers access to the fullest account in existence of the genesis, composition, publication, reception and critical history of The Sacred Fount
• Examines how The Sacred Fount continues to intrigue subsequent generations of readers, who see it as an oblique discussion of the decadent movement of 'modernity' and of constructions of gender and sexuality in the years after the trial of Oscar Wilde