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