Russell, John David

Henry Green : Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag [Early Full-Length Study of Author Henry Green]

New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1960. First Edition, First Printing — American.
A major early critical study of one of Britain’s most elusive modern novelists.

An important early critical examination of Henry Green, the intensely private and stylistically original British novelist whose experimental prose placed him alongside major twentieth-century literary modernists. John Russell approaches Green through the novels themselves rather than biography, emphasizing Green’s unusual handling of dialogue, structure, humor, symbolism, and emotional restraint.

The study traces Green’s development from Pack My Bag through the major novels, including Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Nothing, Doting, and Concluding. The jacket copy notably places Green in conversation with Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, reflecting the growing mid-century reassessment of Green as a major modernist voice. 

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Publisher’s cloth hardcover in original dust jacket. Octavo; 8.25 inches tall. Pages 4–251 with chapter notes and index. Dust jacket priced $5.00 on the front flap.

CONDITION: Very Good / Good. Bindings are tight and square. Text is clean; light, even age-toning. Moderate shelf handling wear. Dust jacket retains the original $5.00 price and shows minor spine-tip loss, small closed edge tears, and light rubbing; now protected in a Mylar sleeve.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE —
Henry Green (Henry Vincent Yorke) maintained an unusual degree of personal anonymity despite producing some of the most formally distinctive English novels of the twentieth century. By 1960, serious scholarly attention to his work remained comparatively limited, making this study an early contribution to Green criticism and modernist literary scholarship.

Russell presents Henry Green as a novelist of paradox, anonymity, and emotional tension, arguing that Green’s fiction reflects a movement from guarded optimism toward increasing pessimism across his career. Rather than constructing a conventional biography, the study focuses on recurring themes of human vulnerability, disenchantment, satire, and social unease.

The work also captures an important moment in Green scholarship, appearing before the broader late-twentieth-century revival of interest in Green’s fiction. For collectors of British modernism, the volume represents one of the earlier attempts to situate Green firmly within the central tradition of experimental twentieth-century literature.

SUBJECTS: Henry Green, British Modernism, Twentieth-Century Fiction, Literary Criticism, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Modernist Fiction, Rutgers University Press, English Literature, Literary Criticism, Modernism, British Literature, Literary Scholarship.

Item #21993

Price: $24.00