Publisher's Synopsis
Fogel raises questions about the nature of literary influence and the role and the role of gender in the responses of authors to tradition and authority. Drawing on Harold Bloom's theory of "the anxiety of influence" and recent critiques of Bloom by feminist critics, he suggests that Bloom's theory is less apt for some authors than for others-less apt for the Joyce-James relation, typified by Joyce's aggressive, playful,virtuoso mockery, satire, and parody than for the Woolf-James relation, in which Henry James may be read as a leading symptom of the patriarchy by which Woolf knew herself to be both oppressed and obsessed. Demonstrating that in their strikingly different ways James Joyce and Virginia Woolf recognized the extent to which Henry James was an indispensable forerunner, Fogel shows that there was something of a mythic, tribal element in their veneration and destruction of James as master.
