Calls for papers
“Henry James and Family” special issue of the Henry James Review
In chapter 4 of The Ambassadors, following a scene that few who have read could ever forget, Strether’s dinner with Maria Gostrey, “whose dress was ‘cut down,’ . . . in respect to shoulders and bosom,” “face to face over a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-colored shades,” and after attending a play in London, Strether outlines the nature of his journey to Paris to Miss Gostrey, who asks whether Mamie Pocock is Chad Newsome’s “own niece.” Strether tries to clarify:
“Oh, you must yourself find a name for the relation. His brother-in-law’s sister. Mrs. Jim’s sister-in-law.”
It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. “And who in the world’s Mrs. Jim?”
“Chad’s sister—who was Sarah Newsome. She’s married—didn’t I mention it?—to Jim Pocock.”
“Ah yes,” she tacitly replied; but he had mentioned things—! Then, however, with all the sound it could have, “Who in the world’s Jim Pocock?” she asked.
“Why, Sally’s husband. That’s the only way we distinguish people at Woollett,” he good-humouredly explained.
“And is it a great distinction—being Sally’s husband?”
He considered. “I think there can be a scarcely greater—unless it may become one, in the future, to be Chad’s wife.”
“Then how do they distinguish you?”
“They don’t--except, as I’ve told you, by the green cover.”
At this point in the novel and for some time after, families make a difference in The Ambassadors, as they do in most of James’s novels, at least.
It’s been about thirty-five years since the spring 1989 issue of the Henry James Review (10.2) brought together articles mostly on or including Henry James’s family, intimate person-to-person matters that relate to and are included in James’s fiction, and quasi-family relations in James’s life and fiction. About two years after that 1989 issue of the HJR, R. W. B. Lewis’s The Jameses: A Family Narrative was published (1991). Three years later Alfred Habegger published The Father (1994) and the next year we were able to read Carol Holly’s Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (1995). Since 1995 scholarship on family and families has not been absent from Henry James studies (e.g., Paul Fisher’s The House of Wits [2013] and a number of recent pieces by Mary M. Burke on James and his Irish ancestry), but neither has it been an emphasis.
Thus the Henry James Review invites essays between 1,000 and 12,500 words on any aspect of “Henry James and Family.” Contributors might choose to engage the topic, for example, through James’s biographical family (immediate and/or distant); archival collections that bring new attention to Henry James’s family or family-like relations in James’s fiction; new conceptions of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century family that would cast light on James’s biography and/or fiction; intimate groups in Henry James’s life or fiction that organize as families, family members, or quasi families; the language of family life as an element of James’s style, etc.
Send submissions to [email protected] by March 1, 2026. Please include “James and Family Special Issue” in the subject line.
The Henry James Society
37th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association
May 20-23, 2026, Palmer House, Chicago, IL
Minor Threads
“There are threads shorter and less tense, and I am far from implying that the minor, the coarser and less fruitful forms and degrees of moral reaction, as we may conveniently call it, may not yield lively results.”
Henry James. The Prefaces
“We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.”
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Despite their subordinate role, minor characters that occupy the periphery of the narrative and / or society serve highly specific artistic and psychological functions. In his Preface to The Ambassadors, James famously described the novel as a “figure in the carpet” – every part connected by design with ficelles or minor characters as the structural threads in that carpet. They may reside in the background, but their effects in “the thickened centre” of experience may threaten or provoke the boundaries of the more major characters’ social order.
James’s minor characters and ficelles dramatize the very process that Deleuze and Guattari theorize as minor literature: the undermining of major authority (Mrs. Grose, Fanny Assingham), the collective expansion of meaning (the observing guests in The Aspern Papers), and the deterritorialization of narrative space (Maria Gostrey, Mrs. Penniman). Considering the very real, revolutionary threat Deleuze and Guattari’s domain of minor literature and minor language presents against the standard or norm of society, James’s deployment of these seemingly marginal figures acquires a new critical weight.
This panel calls for papers that consider the role of minor or marginal characters, those whose status, role, or worldviews circulate along the periphery of the story’s society, yet whose threads of associations affect, disrupt, or propel both major and minor developments.
Possibilities include but are not limited to:
37th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association
May 20-23, 2026, Palmer House, Chicago, IL
Minor Threads
“There are threads shorter and less tense, and I am far from implying that the minor, the coarser and less fruitful forms and degrees of moral reaction, as we may conveniently call it, may not yield lively results.”
Henry James. The Prefaces
“We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.”
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Despite their subordinate role, minor characters that occupy the periphery of the narrative and / or society serve highly specific artistic and psychological functions. In his Preface to The Ambassadors, James famously described the novel as a “figure in the carpet” – every part connected by design with ficelles or minor characters as the structural threads in that carpet. They may reside in the background, but their effects in “the thickened centre” of experience may threaten or provoke the boundaries of the more major characters’ social order.
James’s minor characters and ficelles dramatize the very process that Deleuze and Guattari theorize as minor literature: the undermining of major authority (Mrs. Grose, Fanny Assingham), the collective expansion of meaning (the observing guests in The Aspern Papers), and the deterritorialization of narrative space (Maria Gostrey, Mrs. Penniman). Considering the very real, revolutionary threat Deleuze and Guattari’s domain of minor literature and minor language presents against the standard or norm of society, James’s deployment of these seemingly marginal figures acquires a new critical weight.
This panel calls for papers that consider the role of minor or marginal characters, those whose status, role, or worldviews circulate along the periphery of the story’s society, yet whose threads of associations affect, disrupt, or propel both major and minor developments.
Possibilities include but are not limited to:
- The ficelle as line of flight: Henry James and the aesthetics of the minor – conduits, disruption, and regeneration
- Peripheral agency and the politics of the minor – the minor voice as revolutionary potential via aesthetic and political disturbances
- Marginal figures as minor agents: how socially marginal figures present counter-narratives that resist bourgeois consciousness
- The ethics of attention: minor characters and the expansion of consciousness in James’s work
- The ficelle’s transformation of narrative perspective
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LEON EDEL PRIZE
The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar. The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR.
The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.
Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published. Please send the manuscript in Microsoft Word format.
Send electronic submissions to: [email protected]
Author's name should not appear on the manuscript. Please identify essays as submissions for the Leon Edel Prize. The competition is limited to one submission per author.
A brief curriculum vitae should be included.
Decisions about regular publication are also made at the same time as the prize decision.
Deadline: November 1, 2026