The Correction of Taste

‘Donoghue was alert to the idea of the unsayable, as he circled around the idea of language itself as pliable material, all the more beautiful for that and worthy of our full consideration, but yielding at times to further levels of mystery...’ from foreword by Colm Tóibín In this last written work, the internationally renowned Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue brings an acute critical intelligence to bear on the late novels of Henry James. One of the greatest novelists in the English language, Henry James (1843-1916) was an American-British author who is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism. James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was the central achievement of his early period. The Turn of the Screw (1898) was a high-point of Gothic literature. In The Correction of Taste, Denis Donoghue offers a close reading of James’s final novels, taking as his starting point an observation by T.S. Eliot about the function of literary criticism. Exploring a succession of works such as The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1905), Donoghue brings into sharp focus the complex layers of James’s literary genius.