With these words, F. W. Dupee opened the introduction to his 1945 anthology, The Question of Henry James – equally a summa of much of the best James criticism of the preceding half-century and a kick-off to the James boom to come. Some forty years later, critical temperatures were still running high. Mark Seltzer wrote of the ‘criminal continuity’ between Henry James and the art of power in his 1984 book of that name and Carolyn Porter placed James’s detached, voyeuristic ‘center of consciousness’ at the centre of the American novel’s ideological project. To a certain extent, these charges – with their conjunction of political critique and the claim that James indulged in a form of febrile aestheticism – seemed a throwback to the days of Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Parrington. But a whole series of critical, theoretical and even institutional alterations – changes in the literary and critical canons, changes in the notion of what ‘literature’ is; changes in the ways in which ‘literature’ so constructed is to be interpreted and transmitted – had occurred in the forty years between Dupee and Seltzer, Porter and colleagues. And, not uncoincidentally, in that time James moved from the margins to the centre of literary value. His work was reissued in mass-market paperbacks and installed in ‘Intro to Lit’ courses; it became the object of countless dissertations, articles and monographs. When, in the 1980s, feminists, Marxists and Foucaldians sought to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, James served not only as a convenient target but also as a means for staking out their critique of the status quo.