This article examines the turn at the end of the nineteenth century from young dollplayers sharing secrets with dolls to keeping secrets from them. Using Alice James's diary, the article argues that this practice is tied to the history and significance of diary-keeping and considers how Alice's diary is engaged in similar forms of narrative refusal. This practice of narrative withholding in turn shapes Henry James's late elusive style and representation of female thought.
This article attempts to demonstrate that Henry James's 1873 travel essay "Roman Rides" displays a high degree of a particular kind of "ecological awareness," which does not merely consist of attention to any na & iuml;vely conceived "natural" world. Instead, with the resources of Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology and its ecological implications that Timothy Morton has drawn out, this article shows how James's dramatizing imagination in "Roman Rides" allows readers of the text to make "indirect contact" with real, non-human objects, not in any immediate present but only through the irregular, looping time into which James's essay invites us.
In light of the burgeoning sub-field of collaboration studies, this essay considers unconventional collaborations such as those between living and dead writers. While James frequently evokes Nathaniel Hawthorne, none of his works more directly engages with his precursor than The Bostonians (1886), which reworks the themes and plot of The Blithedale Romance (1852). By reading The Bostonians as an act of imaginative collaboration, we develop a richer understanding of this novel's achievement, its exploration of gender and sexual politics, on the one hand, and its critique of nineteenth-century reform, on the other hand, which has powerful implications for the former.
Tropes of wish-fulfillment and "real life writes the plot" inform The Sacred Fount, James's first new novel after the Dreyfus Affair. Later novels' confidently social, international interactions contrast with this novel's cerebral, introverted theorizing as James's escapism from France's fraught political talk. Let us come to understand the novel James writes to suppress and depoliticize Dreyfus hysteria, assess how its interpersonal strife and provincial settings still haunt the author, and see James asking himself: Might it have been better, one "new March" later, for this self-abnegating narrator to pretend the trip that inspired the novel had never happened, after all?
I argue that The Golden Bowl confronts and entwines a scrutiny of empire and the Jewish question. The Golden Bowl stages a refutation of the era's antisemitism by transposing the Jewish question from France to the imperial Anglophone world, and in doing so the novel addresses the European past, the Anglo-American future, and the attendant political formations of nation-state and empire. Prior accounts of Jewishness in James's work have given lesser attention to his late period aesthetic. I focus on The Golden Bowl because of its deployment of the high style of James's late period, because of its occurrence at a moment of politicized antisemitism and imperial expansion, and, finally, because the aesthetic and the political become inseparable in this novel.
Starting with a reading of James's lesser-known tale "The Special Type" (1900), this essay explores how James sustains and inhabits "types" as recognizable objects for readers to think and feel against. The construction of types in James's fiction provides a dialectical mechanism of making abstractions that I would call "perpetual mediation"-an unfinishable and unpredictable process that indexes a potentially collective existence or a categorical space through an individual character, but the connection between the character and the category remains perpetually subject to questioning and re-making.
Henry James's cities palpitate with psychology and physicality. These cities act as conversational subjects; they are traces of the urban past that appear and haunt a character's present. This essay takes up Agamben's urban specter and James's own theorizing of urban representation in the New York Edition's Prefaces in relation to The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. From London and Venice to the unidentified "American City," James's novels ultimately reveal how cities enact their own past and future consciousnesses in the present day, irrevocably shaping the subject's psyche and remapping the urban landscape.
With an awareness of their shared ethical aestheticism, Henry James encoded "The Author of Beltraffio" (1884) with an allusive network related to the oeuvre of John Addington Symonds. A recovery project undertaken through the lens of disability theory and sensitive to the erasure of the queer archive finds evidence of James's hidden appeal to Symonds through his use of esoteric signifiers related to the homosocial cinquecento workshop of Leonardo da Vinci and the paintings of his disciple Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and to the authors' mutual passion for Italy. James's allusions point as well to the authors' esteem for Walt Whitman's "Calamus" poems and his vision of a democracy underpinned by homosocial comradeship.
This essay reevaluates Lord Warburton's role in The Portrait of a Lady, offering the first sustained examination of his underexplored characterization. Often overlooked as a stereotypical English aristocrat, Warburton is structurally and thematically connected to the novel's American characters and serves as a model for their aspirations and imitations. Drawing on the theories of Thorstein Veblen and Ren & eacute; Girard as well as recent research on upper-class Victorian masculinity, the essay explores Warburton's embodiment of the enduring yet fragile authority of aristocratic privilege and his complex identity, torn between hereditary entitlement and the democratic ideals he associates with America and Isabel Archer.
In "The Jolly Corner," an expatriate makes "his return" to New York after thirty-three years in Europe. He soon becomes obsessed with how he might have turned out had he stayed in America and taken over the family business. So he spends twenty-four days in November exploring his ancestral brownstone in search of his "pure American" doppelganger. James, whose fiction often touches upon religious themes, utilizes the approaching Advent ("Arrival") season as discreet background for this tale about a "wanderer" who, in the autumn of life, seeks a second chance at being an American. Hence, the tale is about "his arrival," his Second Coming.
Abstract: This article provides a brief introduction to some of the Henry James-related items in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware Library in Newark, Delaware, including an unpublished letter by James to the woman writer who, from the late 1890s onward, used the name Rosamund Marriott Watson.
