'Donoghue was alert to the idea of the unsayable, as he circled around the idea of language itself as pliable material, all the more beautiful for that and worthy of our full consideration, but yielding at times to further levels of mystery...' from foreword by Colm Tóibín   

In this last written work, the internationally renowned Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue brings an acute critical intelligence to bear on the late novels of Henry James. One of the greatest novelists in the English language, Henry James (1843-1916) was an American-British author who is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism.

James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was the central achievement of his early period. The Turn of the Screw (1898) was a high-point of Gothic literature. In The Correction of Taste, Denis Donoghue offers a close reading of James's final novels, taking as his starting point an observation by T.S. Eliot about the function of literary criticism. Exploring a succession of works such as The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1905), Donoghue brings into sharp focus the complex layers of James's literary genius.



Denis Donoghue (1928-2021) was one of the world's leading scholars of Irish, English and American literature. He was the first lrish literary critic to gain international prominence. His specialist interests included the work of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, T.S. Eliot, Henry James and modern American poetry. A brilliant thinker and teacher, he was a prolifi c author who published over thirty books of literary criticism. Among these were The Ordinary Universe (1968), Ferocious Alphabets (1981) and Words Alone (2000). He also published a memoir, Warrenpoint (1990). Born in Co. Carlow, he grew up in Warrenpoint, Co. Down, where his father was a sergeant with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Appointed in 1966 to the fi rst chair of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, he went on to hold the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University from 1978 until his retirement in 2010.



'Elegant, witty, informative … Denis writes beautifully about Henry Jame's work … it has a splendid foreword by Colm Tóibín … beautiful, get the book and read it.'



'If you're a Henry James fan, this will be for you.'



'Donoghue was a wonderful critic, erudite but never dull, disruptive in his muted way, and possessed of an elegantly flowing prose style that never asserts itself but is always kept in service of the subject ... Splendid.'