The Wings of the Dove, written after, but published before The Ambassadors, is the fulcrum of the august trinity of novels, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), that James unleashed in the early years of the twentieth century and which constituted what came to be known as his major phase. Weighty in size, they are mighty engines, profoundly serious products of a lifetime’s wisdom, but also daringly innovative, shovelling up the traditional novel into the indeterminacies of the modern. The Wings of the Dove, as James recounts in his Preface, had “ignominiously failed . . . to see itself ‘serialized’” (8), but this proved to be a liberation: …
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Citation: Righelato, Pat. "The Wings of the Dove". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 May 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8174, accessed 21 November 2024.]