At a conference a few years ago, a highly respected Henry James scholar complained about another well-known scholar who, ever since the debate over the canon had begun, was “going around telling everybody that the great advantage of breaking down the canon was that we don’t have to teach Henry James anymore.” The point was that since it is no longer possible to hold that certain authors and texts are simply “better,” and therefore matter more, teachers and scholars no longer need to pretend that Henry James is “good.”

During the 1990s, critics and teachers who do care about Henry James and what he wrote have responded to this sort of anti-Jacobite challenge by emphasizing a James who matters not because what he wrote meets high modernist criteria of literary excellence but because he exemplifies central preoccupations of postmodern thinking. The most influential and oft-cited case for a “postmodern” James (though not the only one) must be Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991), which, among other things, demonstrates how Henry James was addressing similar concerns (and in similar manners) that critics a generation later who are now considered seminal to postmodern theory—namely Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin—would foreground in their own writings.