
Tony Tanner ((18 March 1935 – 5 December 1998) was a British literary critic of the 19th and 20th centuries, and a pioneering figure in the study of American literature. He was a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, where he taught and studied for 38 years, from 1960 until his death in 1998. My first Tony Tanner book was The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (1965).
Reading The Reign of Wonder in the mid-Sixties when I was 16 years old was probably a too ambitious move on my part. I had read some of the writers Tanner analyzed–Twain, some Emerson, some Hemingway, some Thoreau, some Whitman–but none of Henry James, Gertrude Stein, or Sherwood Anderson. James, Stein, and Anderson would have to wait until I attended Marquette University in 1967 and those writers showed up in my required English classes.
But what I gleaned from The Reign of Wonder made me want to read more of Tanner’s writings. Over the years, I read several of Tanner’s books of literary criticism. I enjoyed his Henry James: The Writer and His Work (1985), a short work based on a series of pamphlets the British Council asked Tanner to write about Henry James. For a newcomer to Henry James, Tanner’s slim book guides the reader through James’s long and varied career while providing key insights into James’s works.
Although Tony Tanner wrote about many American writers, both old and new, it was obvious he was most fascinated by Henry James: “From a distance the theme of the blank, quivering American sensibility immersed and involved in the European order seems indeed to be basic to James’s fiction. From the wide-eyed, socially non comprehending condor of Daisy Miller to the perpetually open eyes of Adam Verver; from Daisy Miller’s death in the miasmic atmosphere of Rome to Milly Teale’s turn to the wall in Venice, from succumbing of Roderick Hudson to the suicide of Grace Mavis on board the Patagonia; from the undamaged return of Christopher Newman to the perverse yet enlightened renunciation of Lambert Stretcher; from the confident dismissal of Europeans by Betsy Alden and Pandora, through the precarious victory of Francie Dodson, on to the new kind of mastery of a shattered European society as managed by Mrs. Gracedew and Maggie Verver: in all these related and developed themes the dramatic interlocking of a new sensibility with an old civilization is the fulcrum.” (p. 264-265)
Henry James took risks by making women and children centers of his stories. Take What Maisie Knew (1897) where Maisie, a child abandoned by her real parents and exploited by adulterous step-parents, tries to figure out situations without understanding adult motives. As Tanner cleverly assesses the novel, “In a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know.” (p. 288)
In 2000, Cambridge University Press published The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. While the essays delve into Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Howells, Fitzgerald, DeLillo and Pynchon, the best essays in The American Mystery focus on Henry James. If you’re interested in astute literary criticism of classic American writers, The American Mystery, The Reign of Wonder, and Henry James are hard to beat. GRADE: A (for all three)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword — ix
Edward W. Said |
Sources — xii
Introduction: Tony Tanner on American means of writing and means of writing America — xiv
Ian F. A. Bell |
Lustres and condiments: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays |
1(8)
`A summer in the country’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance |
9(30)
`Nothing but cakes and ale’: Herman Melville’s White-Jacket |
39(23)
`All interweavingly working together’: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick |
62(19)
Melville’s counterfeit detector: The Confidence-Man |
81(23)
`The Story in It’ – and the story without it |
104(17)
Henry James |
Henry James’s `saddest story’: The Other House |
121(11)
Henry James and Shakespeare |
132(17)
`Feelings of middle life’: William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer |
149(17)
`The story of the moon that never rose’: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby |
166(35)
Don DeLillo and `the American mystery’: Underworld |
201(21)
`The Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes’: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon |
222(17)
Index — 239

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements | viii |
Introduction: the sleep of reason | 1 |
The Transcendentalists | |
Saints behold: the transcendentalist point of view | 19 |
Emerson: the unconquered eye and the enchanted circle | 26 |
Thoreau and the sauntering eye | 46 |
Walt Whitman’s ecstatic first step Transcendentalism and Imagism | 64 87 |
Mark Twain | |
The doctors of the wilderness | 97 |
A system of reduction | 104 |
The voice of the outlaw | 127 |
The pond of youth | 143 |
Huck Finn and the reflections of a saphead | 155 |
The Twentieth Century | |
Gertrude Stein and the complete actual present | 187 |
Sherwood Anderson’s Little Things | 205 |
Ernest Hemingway’s Unhurried Sensations | 228 |
Henry James | |
The candid outsider | 261 |
The range of wonderment | 278 |
The subjective adventure | 309 |
Afterword: wonder and alienation – the mystic and the moviegoer | 336 |
References | 362 |
Index– 381 |

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Preface — ix
I. America and Europe, 1843-1881: ” A Complex Fate” — 3
II. London, 1882-1898: “The Compendium of the World” — 49
III. Lamb House, 1899-1916: “The Divine Unrest” — 97
A Select Bibliography — 133