This essay examines four different instances of the creative adaptation not of ‘the author’ James himself but of his most influential, ‘authoritative’, novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898): in the medium of the gothic tale (Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’, 1994), the litcrit campus thriller (A. 1) has called ‘the moment of Henry James’ (and Lodge more recently conceptualized as ‘The Year of Henry James’)1 in order to retrace, recreate, and refract the multiple personae of a writer whose experimentation with issues of authorship, identity, and subjectivity reflects central literary and critical preoccupations of the turn of the millennium. 65) has noted, the genre of biofiction has had particular resonance: Emma Tennant’s Felony (2002), Cólm Toíbin’s The Master (2004), and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004) all invest in what John Freedman (1998, p. In recent years scholarship on Henry James has been enriched by the influence the ‘master’ of the turn-of-the-century ‘Art of Fiction’ has exerted specifically on the neo-Victorian imagination. After analyzing the narrative frames of several stories as architectural passages between fiction and reality, this chapter concludes by associating James’s construct of the “house of fiction” with the haunted house in his stories, conceptualized as the ultimate stage where ghost texts act out their “emptiness and incompletion.” It then argues that in James’s ghost stories the true ghost is always a metaliterary “ghost text” represented consistently as a lost original, an illegible or destroyed manuscript. Interrogating the “psychological ghost story” genre, this chapter suggests that the Jamesian ghostly resorts to structures of repetition enacted in the stories, mainly in the idea of heredity and family curses, and in the transmission of texts across time, equating texts with testaments. This chapter begins with a reflection on how the largely overlooked publishing history of James’s supernatural short stories may offer an alternative account of the plot twists, tropes, and motifs of the form that we have long taken as given.
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