The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew: New Critical Essays/The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism

Neil Cornwell, and Maggie Malone, eds. The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew: New Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. 252 pp. $45.

Henry James. The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren, eds. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1999. 271 pp. $9.

Arriving close on the heels of the centenary of the tale's publication, these two volumes testify to the secure position that "The Turn of the Screw" holds in James studies and in the undergraduate canon. Yet their very appearance begs the question of their provenance-whence and why?-even as it forecloses on that very question. A Norton edition (especially a second one) of any work has the air of a tautological self-justification. And a collection of New Critical Essays presents itself as a supplement to a body of worthy "old" ones, even as it signifies the contemporary currency of the work it discusses. In both instances we are dealing with a publishing genre whose tendency (if not intention) is to affirm and reproduce the status of a particular literary work as worthy of particular kinds of attention, whether in the context of teaching (as with the Norton) or scholarly inquiry (as with the New Critical Essays). Each of these volumes fulfills the requirements of its genre more than adequately, with the New Critical Essays collection providing some additional interest and provocation, for reasons I shall discuss shortly. But first, to summarize the merits of each on its own terms.

The Critical Edition, as is usual in the Norton series, augments the text of "The Turn of the Screw" itself with a constellation of appendices: notebook and prefatory material from the author, early reviews, vintage textual illustrations, and an historical overview of relevant literary criticism. The keynote for this overview is Edna Kenton's 1924 essay, whose epistemological riddle-Is the governess mad, or are the ghosts real?-establishes the basic paradigm for most of the other interpretations included here. This...