The many lives of Henry James – biographers, critics and novelists on the Mastere

The return of life-writing genres, biographical writing in particular, to the heart of present-day literary practices remains one of the most interesting phenomena in contemporary literature written in English. The article discusses a number of narratives (written by biographers, literary critics and novelists) which have emerged in the last decades and which attempt to present and critically analyse the life of Henry James, the master of American fiction at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The author recapitulates on the major trends in contemporary biographical practices which address the life of Henry James – especially the conclusions reached by biographers and critics associated with Marxism, Deconstruction, Feminism and Queer Theory. Moreover, the article investigates the phenomenon of the nearly simultaneous arrival of several biographical novels about Henry James.