The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

This is the only book that compares the work of these 2 Masters of fiction and film, a provocative, rich pairing
Brings together a range of literary and film scholars and theorists, collecting new work by important and well-known critics
Features over 35 halftone illustrations

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Description

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock knew too much. Self-imposed exiles fully in the know, they approached American and European society as inside-outsiders, a position that afforded them a kind of double vision. Masters of their arts, manipulators of their audiences, prescient and pathbreaking in their techniques, these demanding and meticulous artists fiercely defended authorial and directorial control. Their fictions and films are obsessed with knowledge and its powers: who knows what? What is there to know?

The Men Who Knew Too Much innovatively pairs these two greats, showing them to be at once classic and contemporary. Over a dozen major scholars and critics take up works by James and Hitchcock, in paired sets, to explore the often surprising ways that reading James helps us watch Hitchcock and what watching Hitchcock tells us about reading James. A wide-range of approaches offer fresh insights about spectatorship, narrative structure, and cinematic representation, as well as the relationship between technology and art, the powers of silence, sensory-and sensational-experiences, the impact of cognition, and the uncertainty of interpretation. The essays explore the avowal and disavowal of familial bonds, as well as questions of Victorian convention, female agency, and male anxiety. And they fruitfully engage issues related to patriarchy, colonialism, national, transnational, and global identities. The capacious collection, with its brilliant insights and intellectual surprises, is equally compelling in its range and cogency for James readers and film theorists, for Hitchcock fans and James scholars.

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Reading James with Hitchcock, Reading Hitchcock with James, Susan Griffin and Alan Nadel
National Bodies, Susan Griffin
Secrets, Lies, and "Virtuous Attachments": The Ambassadors and The 39 Steps, Brenda Austin-Smith
Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock after the American Century: Circulation and Non-Return in The American Scene and Strangers on a Train, Brian T. Edwards
Colonial Discourse and the Unheard Other in Washington Square and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alan Nadel
Bump: Concussive Knowledge in James and Hitchcock, Mary Ann O'Farrell
James's Birdcage/Hitchcock's Birds, Patrick O'Donnell
Sounds of Silence in The Wings of the Dove and Blackmail, Donatella Izzo
The Perfect Enigma, Judith Roof
Hands, Objects and Love in James and Hitchcock: Reading the Touch in The Golden Bowl and Notorious, Jonathan Freedman
The Touch of the Real: Circumscribing Vertigo, Eric Savoy
Specters of Respectability: Victorian Horrors in The Turn of the Screw and Psycho, Aviva Briefel
Caged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in Henry James's In the Cage and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, John Carlos Rowe
Shadows of Modernity: What Maisie Knew and Shadow of a Doubt, Thomas B. Byers
Awkward Ages: James and Hitchcock In Between, Mark Goble
Works Cited
Contributors
Index

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Author Information

Susan Griffin is a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville.

Alan Nadel is William T. Bryan Chair in American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky.

Contributors:

Brenda Austin-Smith, University of Manitoba
Brian T. Edwards, Northwestern University
Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M University
Patrick O'Donnell, Michigan State University
Donatella Izzo, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples
Judith Roof, Michigan State University
Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan
Eric Savoy, University of Montreal
Aviva Briefel, Bowdoin
John Carlos Rowe, USC
Thomas B. Byers, University of Louisville
Mark Goble, University of California, Berkeley

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Reviews and Awards

"Readers will be at once surprised and enlightened by the similarities discovered between Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock. These excellent essays persuasively and lucidly argue for a shared set of preoccupations in the works of the novelist and the filmmaker: preoccupations about personal and national identity, knowledge and authority, sexuality and gender. Each artist is shown to inspire new and important readings of the other. This is an original and highly readable contribution to literary and cultural studies." --Leo Bersani, University of California, Berkeley

"To 'read' these artists in tandem is to appreciate not only the special achievement of each, but the way great artists pursue a dialogue across time, across media, that allows us to honor the distinctive quality of James's narratives from a cinematic perspective, and the roots of Hitchcock's cinematic triumphs in daring novelistic experiments." --Lee Clark Mitchell, Princeton University

"Refreshingly original.... [T]he book provides a fresh insight as to relationships between texts, and our choices on how to 'read' one with the 'help of' the other." --Journal of American Studies of Turkey

"The Men Who Knew Too Much will no doubt become required reading for scholars of both James and Hitchcock, but the originality and imagination with which literature and film are brought together here mean it deserves the attention of a much broader readership." -- The Henry James Review