Episode 29: Jim Phelan & Dorothy Hale — Chapter I of Henry James’s The Ambassadors

Project Narrative

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Dorothy Hale discuss the first chapter of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, which was published as a novel in September 1903 after its previous appearance as a serial narrative in the North American Review. Dorothy Hale is a professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has held the Rachel Anderson Stageberg Chair in English. Hale has made important contributions to two fields within the larger territory of narrative studies: the Anglo-American novel and the theory of the novel. Hale is the author of Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present, which won the Narrative Society’s Perkins Prize for the Best Book on Narrative, published in 1998. Hale is also the author of The Novel and the New Ethics, published in 2020. In addition, Hale has done prodigious work as an editor and an authorial guide in the volume, The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000.