Alfred Habegger

A Well Hidden Hand

Question: Why are certain cheap books so fantastically popular? Answers: Because most readers are poorly educated or marginally literate, because they cannot resist promotional hype or other forms of mass manipulation, because they tolerate nothing but cliches, stock character-types, and certified Big Ideas, and because they consistently mistake certain familiar emotions, fantasies, stage effects, or mere organ tones for art.

Henry James and the 'Woman Business'

Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. The lessons of the father: Henry James, Sr., on sexual difference 3. Precocious incest: first novels by Louisa May Alcott and Henry James 4. The chains of literature: Elizabeth Stoddard and Henry James 5. Anne Moncure Crane Seemuller: Henry Jamess Jocasta 6. Minnie Temples death and the birth of Henry Jamess imagination 7. The fatherless heroine and the filial son: deep background for The Portrait of a Lady 8. The return of the father in The Bostonians 9. Conclusion Notes Index.