Jointly published by Plunkett Lake Press and Cornell University Press. “In the early years of my psychotherapeutic practice, I was struck by the pervasive uncertainty that many of my patients, both young and not so young, felt about their work lives. I soon became dissatisfied with constructions that depended solely on internal conflict for an explanation when there was so obviously a cultural and historical dimension to the problem... I decided to embark on a more extended study of the James family... I found the Jameses to be vivid personalities with a gift for self scrutiny and an enviable habit of weekly letter writing and letter saving that spans American history from the close of the American Revolution to the end of the first World War. They could, I thought, be looked upon as an avant garde with characteristics that are commonplace now but were unusual then. They were urban and educated, with sufficient means to have genuine choices. Hoping to discover the historical and cultural context for what I heard and saw in my consultation room, I set out to harvest the James family experience.” — Howard M. Feinstein, Introduction to the 1999 edition of Becoming William James Becoming William James was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1985. “Howard Feinstein has written a brilliant study of William’s crises over idleness, illness, and vocation within the context of intense parental and sibling entanglement.” — London Review of Books “Dr. Feinstein’s book is certainly a success. He has offered us a rich new vocabulary with which to describe William James.” — Willard Gaylin, The New York Times “Howard M. Feinstein, a psychiatrist and historian, has finally given us a life study equal in richness to James himself... a superb developmental biography.” — Dorothy Ross, The American Historical Review “Becoming William James is a work of painstaking scholarship, written in an engaging and energetic style... Feinstein is also to be commended for a playful sense of irony, which prevents this psychobiographical study from degenerating, as others have, into a series of diagnostic vignettes... [an] excellent study.” — Brian Mahan, The Journal of Religion “The best and truest thing one could say about the richly provocative Becoming William James is that William, while perhaps raising an eyebrow here and there, would have welcomed it and praised it lavishly.” — Times Literary Supplement “[Feinstein] offers us much new or reevaluated information about James and his family. In particular, he offers a series of challenges to the received views of James’s life: the nature of his relationship with his father and brother Henry, the causes of his abandonment of a career as a painter, the etiology of his various crises...” — James Campbell, CrossCurrents “Feinstein’s volume presents a finely nuanced reading of the internal Sturm und Drang of William James’s early years; he places center stage the familial conflicts over vocation... Feinstein’s deep penetration into the documentary sources of the James family history unearths many new insights and facts...” — George Cotkin, American Quarterly “[A] solidly documented, steadily perceptive, and long overdue biography... Feinstein’s thesis is strong in its outline, rich in its detail… [Feinstein] sheds penetrating light into the darker regions of one of America’s great families.” — Kirkus “Since its first publication in 1984, the book has been highly praised for its imaginative yet painstaking exploration of the parent-child and sibling relationships of one of America’s most complexly gifted families.” — Marcus Cunliffe, American Studies International “Becoming William James does much to restore the intellectual respectability of psychoanalytic history. Written by a historian and psychiatrist with a sensitivity to the nuances and rich subtlety of emotional phenomena, the book depicts the early turmoils and ultimate triumphs of one of America’s great philosophers. And it does so without succumbing to the crude reductionism that plagues psychohistory in the hands of amateur psychologists... a solid achievement. The writing is vivid and well-paced, the research is thorough.” — John Patrick Diggins, Reviews in American History “Becoming William James is a psychobiography of James that covers the early part of his life. James begs for this sort of treatment... Feinstein is well equipped to undertake such a biography. He is professionally qualified as a psychiatrist but is also an indefatigable researcher and industrious historian... possibly the finest work yet to appear in the genre of psychohistory... On every page the author’s intelligence is at work.” — Bruce Kuklick, American Journal of Education “Howard M. Feinstein has written a remarkable biography of William James that narrates the course of his character development up to the year he was formally appointed to Harvard’s Philosophy Department as an Assistant Professor in 1880. Feinstein’s work is revisionary in the best sense... Feinstein argues persistently and persuasively that intergenerational battles between father and son — cultural variants to be sure — accounted more than anything else for William James’s personal and professional development which, indeed, were one and the same.” — Henry Samuel Levinson, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society “A well-focused theme and inventive but rigorous scholarship mean that Howard M. Feinstein’s study of the first three decades in the life of William James is timely and valuable.” — Steven Weiland, The Journal of American History “Feinstein’s chronicle is absorbing.” — Lawrence Willson, The Sewanee Review “This absorbing study of the intergenerational effects one famous family had upon its individual members remains invaluable” — Seana Graham, Simply Charly

The Net of Nemesis examines the trope of tragic bond/age, in which humanity is the beneficiary of bonds that nurture and unite and the victim of bondage that confines and restrains. Manifestations of the trope in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, Miltonic epic, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction repeat and vary the trope's central symbol of the net and other, related leitmotifs and demonstrate that such orchestration resolves the conflict between bonds and bond/age and informs the catharsis and transcendence essential to tragedy.

Ultimately, Young William James Thinking reveals how James provided a humane vision well suited to our pluralist age.

Essays in Religion and Morality brings together a dozen papers of varying length to these two themes so crucial to the life and thought of William James. Reflections on the two subjects permeate, first, James's presentation of his father's Literary Remains; second, his writings on human immortality and the relation between reason and faith; third, his two memorial pieces, one on Robert Gould Shaw and the other on Emerson; fourth, his consideration of the energies and powers of human life; and last, his writings on the possibilities of peace, especially as found in his famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War." These speeches and essays were written over a period of twenty-four years. The fact that James did not collect and publish them himself in a single volume does not reflect on their intrinsic worth or on their importance in James's philosophical work, since they include some of the best known and most influential of his writings. All the essays, throughout their varied subject matter, are consistently and characteristically Jamesian in the freshness of their attack on the problems and failings of humankind and in their steady faith in human powers.

The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers—Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and Henry James—open up the domain of the witness by articulating quietude’s claim on the clamoring world. The premise of quiet testimony responds to urgent questions in critical theory and human rights. Emerson is brought into conversation with Levinas, and Douglass is considered alongside Agamben. Yet the book is steeped in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, in which speech and meaning might exceed the bounds of the recognized human subject. In this context, Melville’s characters could read the weather, and James’s could spend an evening with dead companions. By following the path by which ostensibly unremarkable entities come to voice, Quiet Testimony suggests new configurations for ethics, politics, and the literary.

When the archive of the English philosopher and polymath Colin Wilson (1931–2013) was opened at the University of Nottingham, UK, in the summer of 2011, it was agreed among those present that a Conference should be arranged there to discuss his work. 2016 was mooted as an appropriate date coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of his first (and still most famous) book, The Outsider; a book that has remained in print since publication day in May 1956 and now been translated into well over 30 languages. This volume contains the transcripts of the papers presented at that inaugural one-day conference on July 1, 2016. Experts, scholars and fans, from around the globe, gathered to hear and present papers on a variety of Wilson-related topics ranging from Existentialism to the Occult; from H.P. Lovecraft to Jack the Ripper; and from Science Fiction to Transcendental Evolution.

​Recipient of the “Approved Edition” seal from the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions This volume of The Complete Letters of Henry James: 1880–1883 includes 122 letters, 67 of which are published for the first time, written between June 6, 1880, and October 20, 1881. The letters record Henry James’s confirmation of his identity as a London resident, follow his struggles with the complexities of his professional life, and illustrate his closer attention to family and friends. His friends, such as Henry and Clover Adams, and family members, such as his brother, William, view him as their resident Londoner. When his sister, Alice, and her companion, Katharine Loring, travel to Britain, James both supervises Alice’s state of health and also reports on its status to their parents. The letters show Henry James’s professional life as he shifts away from writing pot-boiling reviews and short fiction toward the greater novels that continue to be associated with him, especially The Portrait of a Lady. We also see James negotiating with publishers and arranging whenever possible simultaneous publication in Britain and the United States in order to maximize his writing income. This volume concludes with James’s much-anticipated return to his native America, buoyed by his completion of The Portrait of a Lady. The journey marked a significant milestone in the author’s life.

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.