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Prof Philip Horne

 
 

Email: f.horne@ucl.ac.uk
External phone: 020 7679 3123
Internal phone: 33123
Office: Foster Court 204

 
 

Philip Horne in front of HJ's last abode in Chelsea at 21 Carlyle Mansions

Philip Horne in front of Henry James's last home, at 21 Carlyle Mansions in Chelsea

Education and Experience


I received my MA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and held a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge before moving to UCL. Henry James is my central literary interest; I have served as the President of the International Henry James Society, delivered the Henry James lecture at the Rye Festival, and talked about James in the UK, the US, China, Japan, Australia, France and Italy. I organised two Henry James conferences in London, in 2012 and (on the centenary of his death) 2016. I have worked a good deal in US archives, and have also taught two semesters at Dartmouth College.

I have a strong interest in film as well as in literature, an interest which takes many forms, but has included a sustained effort to restore the reputation of the neglected British film director Thorold Dickinson, resulting in a book (see below). I organised a centenary conference in 2003, and seasons at the British Film Institute and the Barbican Centre; in 2008 I introduced Dickinson films in New York and at Yale.

I have interviewed filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, John Boorman, Michael Haneke, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne and Terence Davies. I have written on literature and film for newspapers and magazines, including an enjoyable decade doing regular reviews of films on DVD for the Daily Telegraph.

Research

My first book was Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (OUP, 1990), a scholarly and also a critical and theoretical study of James’s extraordinary revisionary activity. My next project was Henry James: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 1999), an experimental variation on the Victorian form of the Life-and-Letters.

I was co-editor with Peter Swaab of Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film (Manchester UP, 2008); and, with Tamara Follini, of a special issue of the Cambridge Quarterly entitled Henry James in the Modern World (2008). I have also edited Henry James, A London Life & The Reverberator (for Oxford World’s Classics), as well as Henry James, The Tragic Muse and Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (both for Penguin).

In 2018 I published Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Never Wrote (Vintage), a collection of new stories by major contemporary novelists inspired by unused ideas from Henry James’s notebooks.

I am Series Editor of the Penguin Classics Henry James, for which I completed an edition of The Portrait of a Lady in 2011.

I am also the founding General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Complete Fiction of Henry James (planned in 34 volumes, of which 9 were out by the end of 2020). I am editing two volumes myself, The Golden Bowl and the Notebooks, and co-editing another, A Landscape Painter and Other Tales with Emily Coit and Tamara Follini.

Another long-term project is a book on the relationship between Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.

As well as essays on many aspects of Henry James, I have written on a wide range of subjects, including telephones and literature, zombies and consumer culture, Floods, Bob Dylan and the Mississippi, the films of Powell and Pressburger and of Martin Scorsese, the texts of Emily Dickinson, the narrators of Dickens and the criticism of F.R. Leavis. My research interests—apart from Henry James—include literary allusion, literature and politics, and the relations between the living and the dead in film. I have supervised PhDs on a variety of topics including Geoffrey Hill and John Milton, feral children in literature, the films of Powell and Pressburger, James and religion, boredom and the novel, the films of Kieslowski, Edith Wharton, modernity and the cinema, the grotesque in 1930s Hollywood, Tennyson’s afterlives, James’s late non-fiction, James and the domestic interior, James and transport, revision in contemporary literature and the literary agent James Brand Pinker.

My editing work, and interest in the conditions of authorship, align me closely with the Editions strand of the Department’s research profile (I organised the conference on it in December 2019); while my biographical work puts me squarely in the field of 'Life Stories'. Because James was on the whole an intensely metropolitan writer, and because much of cinema is concerned with urban experience, The City is also a significant presence in my research.

Selected Publications

Books

Henry James: A Life in Letters, Penguin, 1999.

Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition, Oxford University Press, 1990.

Edited Books and Journal Issues

Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Never Wrote, Vintage 2018.

Co-ed. with Peter Swaab, Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
Co-ed. with Tamara Follini, Henry James in the Modern World, special issue of Cambridge Quarterly, 37. 1 (March 2008). Contributors: Michael Anesko, R.D. Gooder, Tamara Follini, Philip Horne, Christopher Ricks, Adrian Poole, Millicent Bell, Jonathan Freedman, Nicola Bradbury, Max Saunders, Jean Gooder, Sergio Perosa, T.J. Lustig.

Ed. with Introduction, Charles Dickens, Oliver, Penguin Classics, 2002.

Ed. with Introduction, Henry James, The Tragic Muse, Penguin Classics, 1995.

Ed. with Introduction, Pardon My Delay: Letters from Henry James to Bruce Richmond, The Foundling Press, 1994.

Ed. with Introduction, Henry James, A London Life & The Reverberator, Oxford World’s Classics, 1989.

Articles

‘“Mildly Theatrical”: Attending (to) The Awkward Age’, Henry James Review, 41(3), 2020, 271-279.

‘Three and a Half Hours with Scorsese’, interview, on The Irishman, Sight & Sound, November 2019, 20-29.

‘Henry James on the Bench’, May 2019, Henry James Review, 40.2, Spring 2019, 155-174.

‘Strings of Pearls: James, Maupassant, “Paste”’, Literary Imagination, 21(2), July 2019, 137-157.

‘Sense of the West: When Henry James visited California’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 September 2018, 3-4.        

‘Remembering Karl Miller’, editing, introduction, conclusion and linking passages, Raritan, Fall 2017, 37.2, 1-35.

‘Henry James, Winchelsea, Rye and Denis Duval’, Henry James Review, Fall 2017, 38(3), 219-230.

‘Henry James and the Pagoda’, in Jamesian Cultural Anxiety in the East and the West: The Co-Constitutive nature of the Cosmopolite Spirit, ed. Choon-Hee Kim, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020, 93-115.

‘A Last Wintering’, on James’s last illness, death and funeral, Times Literary Supplement, 4 March 2016, 16-17.

‘The Interview: John Boorman’, career-spanning interview, Sight & Sound, May 2015, 48-52.

‘Poodle and Bull Moose’, on Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt in 1914, Times Literary Supplement, Issue 5802, 13 June 2014, 13-15.

‘Flood Songs, Dylan and the Mississippi Blues’, Raritan, 33(2), Fall 2013, 30-66. (ISSN 0275-1607).

‘Passing Through’, article and interview with Richard Linklater about Before Midnight, Sight & Sound, July 2013, 30-34.

‘Clough, James and Amours de Voyage: a Juxtaposition’, Literary Imagination, 15(1), February 2013, 89-104.

‘Polanski and the Grotesque’, Sight & Sound, February 2013, 40-44.

‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ (review-essay on Polanski’s The Ghost), Sight & Sound, May 2010, 38-41. (http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49618)

‘We’ll Go for Flamboyance’, on Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades, Sight & Sound, January 2010, 9.

‘Revisitings and Revisions in the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James’, in The Blackwell Companion to Henry James, ed. Greg Zacharias, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, 208-230.

‘“A palpable imaginable visitable past”: Henry James and the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 32(2), Spring 2008, 14-28.

‘Introduction: Henry James in the Modern World’; ‘“Reinstated”: James in Roosevelt’s Washington’, Cambridge Quarterly Special Issue on ‘Henry James in the Modern World’, 37(1), March 2008, 1-2; 47-63.

Preface to Henry James’s Waistcoat, ed. Rosalind Bleach, York: Stone Trough Books, 2007.

‘Henry James and the “forces of violence”: on the track of “big game” in “The Jolly Corner”‘, Henry James Review, 27(3), 2006, 237-247.

‘The Presence of Henry James in European Cinema’, in Duperray, A. (ed.) The Reception of Henry James in Europe, Reception of British Authors in Europe series; Series ed. Elinor Shaffer, London: Continuum, 2006, 260-282.

‘Life and Death in A Matter of Life and Death’, in Ian Christie & Andrew Moor (eds), The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-Maker, London: British Film Institute, 2005, 117-131.

“Henry James Among the Poets” (Henry James Lecture, Rye Festival 2002), Henry James Review, 26(1), Winter 2005, 68-81.

‘The Biography of “Daisy Miller”‘ in Reed, K., Beidler, P.G. (eds.) Approaches to Teaching Henry James’s ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Turn of the Screw’, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2005, 46-52.

‘James, Henry (1843–1916)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004.

“Henry James and the Cultural Frame of the New York Edition”, in The Culture of Collected Editions, ed. Andrew Nash, Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2003, 95-110.

‘The Poetry of Possibilities: Emily Dickinson’s Texts’, Women’s Studies 3 (2002), 725-738.

The Age of Innocence: Scorsese, Wharton, James’, Film Studies: An international review, Issue 3, Spring 2002, 5-17.

‘Martin Scorsese and the Film Between the Living and the Dead’, Raritan, 21(1), Summer 2001, 34-51.

‘Henry James: Varieties of Cinematic Experience’, in Henry James on Stage and Screen, edited by John Bradley, Palgrave, 2000, 35-55.

‘On the Phone: Some Connections’, Raritan, 18(3), Winter 1999, 103-122.

‘Retreats and Recognitions: Scorsese’s Kundun’, Film Studies: An international review, Issue 1, Spring 1999, 95-96.

‘Poets and Prophets: Geoffrey Hill in America’, Symbiosis, 2(2), October 1998, 161-174.

‘Henry James at Work: The Question of Our Texts’, chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, edited by Jonathan Freedman, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 63-78.

‘The Master and the “Queer Affair” of “The Pupil”’, in Henry James: The Shorter Fiction, edited by N.H. Reeve, Macmillan 1997, 114-137.

‘Henry James and the Economy of the Short Story’, chapter in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, edited by Ian Willison, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik, Macmillan 1996, 1-35.

‘The Lessons of Flaubert: James and L’Education Sentimentale’, The Yearbook of English Studies 1996: Strategies of Reading: Dickens and After, Vol. 26, edited by Nicola Bradbury, 154-162.

‘The English Novel 1900-1914’, in The Penguin History of Literature, Volume 7: The Twentieth Century, edited by Martin Dodsworth, Harmondsworth 1994, 65-108.

‘Revealers and Concealers’, Essays in Criticism, 43(4), October 1993, 273-283.

‘I Shopped with a Zombie’, on the cultural significance of the zombie, Critical Quarterly, 34(4), Winter 1992, 97-110.

‘Writing and Rewriting in Henry James’, Journal of American Studies, 1989, 23(3), 357-374.
‘ Independent Beauty’, on James’s criticism, Journal of American Studies, 1987 21(1), 87-93.
‘ The Editing of James’s Letters’, The Cambridge Quarterly, Spring 1986, 126-141.

‘A Bibliography of Works by and about Geoffrey Hill’, in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, edited by Peter Robinson, Open University Press, 1985, 237-251.