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Since the 1990s, when the late novels of Henry James became a touchstone for the ethical turn in literary criticism, ethical critics of different persuasions, such as Martha Nussbaum and J. Hillis Miller, homed in on certain complex terms and ambiguous avowals in James's prose in their efforts to hold him up as an 'exemplary' writer, committed to 'ethical' values such as particularity and singularity. In doing so, these critics overlooked the prospect that at this point in his career James was testing a new sort of literary abstractionism. Like painterly abstraction, literary abstraction makes room for the material and the particular at the same time as it denies them. To illustrate this, I examine a cluster of Jamesian keywords – 'do/doing/done' – from The Golden Bowl (1904) and elsewhere, to dispute the view that James systematically shuns abstraction. Instead, I propose that abstraction – depending for its effect on absorption, entanglement, and bewilderment – be read not as a withdrawal from life into 'the vague', cerebral, imaginary, or purely aesthetic realm, but a move to create deep involvements between characters and between readers and texts, and as such should be regarded as a central motivation of James's evasive late style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wells-James debate about the function of the novel has influenced decades of formalist and humanist criticism that has elevated Henry James as the quintessential ethical stylist and struggled to come to terms with H.G. Wells's literary artistry. This article reevaluates Wells's early fiction as the work of a self-conscious stylist who developed a politically and ethically motivated aesthetic that it calls 'adjustment-style.' It then highlights Wells's significance for a modernist-influenced strand of twenty-first-century writing from which critical common sense has excluded him as forebear, by reading the confluences between his work and that of Ali Smith. In doing so it aims to add nuances to the emergent conceptualisation of the metamodern novel which, it argues, is characterised by its own forms of adjustment-style. It contends that a close reading of Smith's metamodern style makes Wells more visible in our view of the contemporary novel; just as placing Smith in a continuum with Wells illuminates her own distinctive style and challenges many of the familiar novelistic binaries that have been extrapolated from the Wells-James debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new account of masochism, retheorising it in terms of both gender and artistic practice through a reading of Henry James's 'Nona Vincent' (1892). In this story, theatre structures a mode of pleasure that explodes the gendered division of artistic labour whereby women inspire and men 'do'. This feminising fantasy of authorship responds to the scandals spawned by performances of Ibsen's 'women's plays' in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry James is recognised as a major literary influence on modernism as it developed in Great Britain and the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet in the increasingly politicised writings of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, James stood for far more than literary experimentation. In Pound's writings, the novelist figured as an author peculiarly sensitive to notions of race and cultural integrity. In this essay, I explore Pound's creation of a 'Fascist' James, one whose battles on behalf of 'civilisation' came increasingly to signify for Pound a narrow, culturally exclusive and authoritarian world. By the late 1930s, James featured in Pound's Italian journalism as an ideal author for his 'Fascist Library'. With readings of Pound's early writings on James alongside in-depth analyses of the Pisan Cantos (1948), I argue that James's fictions of encounter between America and Europe became key to Pound's later vision of culture – a vision increasingly marked by its emphasis on the cultural and racial unity of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that James gives us a version of individualism through the aesthetic that ultimately relies on a privileged solitary regard for existence. What James describes in his own life as the 'essential loneliness of my life' is the 'essential ground' to his rendering of what he calls the 'inward life' and its 'more intimate education'. James still offers us today important lessons for education in an age that, as Michael D. Higgins argues, is devoted to individualism and competition. He grants the reader both private moments of 'dawdling' and a philosophy of artistic practice where the solitary reflection on beauty allows us to re-evaluate isolation and loneliness as entry points into the contemplation of the beautiful as a ground for education. It reminds us to allow students to come to terms with their loneliness as an emotion that grants them states of mindfulness and reflection that can then enable them to work out what are the reasons for their likes and dislikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using notions such as aspectuality, metarepresentation, extended cognition, and distributed identity, which were first developed by cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind and later adapted to the study of fictional consciousness by cognitive narratology, this paper explores the social construction of Flora Saunt's identity in Henry James's 'Glasses' (1896). This short story is a fine specimen of a group of first-person Jamesian narratives which could be summarily characterised as tales of absent or effaced protagonists for the simple reason that their alleged central figures are seldom, if ever, directly available to the reader and mostly exist as sets of consensual or conflicted images lodged in the minds of other inhabitants of the storyworld. In the specific case of 'Glasses', for instance, an analysis of its cognitive make-up provides sufficient evidence to conclude that the construction of Flora as a vain, deceitful woman is heavily contingent on the gender peculiarities of the sources that represent and metarepresent her mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay challenges a certain trend in the Anglo-American reception of Lacan - namely, the tendency to either explicitly or implicitly section off his work on the literary from his attempts to present, in a non-metaphorical fashion, the mathematised structure of the psychoanalytic subject. It is, I argue, only when proper account is taken of Lacan's topologisation of the unconscious that the precise nature of Lacan's reading methodology - offered as an alternative to 'applied psychoanalysis' - becomes clear. The essay begins by noting the choice Lacan made in the 1970s to align the unconscious not with the symbolic (language and law) but with the real and outlines why the latter concept is best presented as a topological ex-sistence. Following an examination of the two topological qualities that define the psychoanalytic subject (the unlocalisable twist and the irreducible hole), the essay concludes with an explanation of the dense arguments proffered in two little read écrits on the subject of psychoanalytic literary criticism ('Lituraterre' and 'Preface to the Work of Robert Georgin') and articulates why the relation between the unconscious and literature is not akin to that between cause and effect but instead concerns a shared structural real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Atwood'sAlias Grace(1996) is examined in relation to her theorization of death and authorship inNegotiating With the Dead(2002). Broader theories of death, the author, and posthumous narration, as proposed by Roland Barthes, Alice Bennett, and others, are also employed. The novel is further linked to what Atwood herself calls a Jamesian form of ghost story, and is read alongside two stories by Henry James (‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) and ‘The Middle Years’ (1893)). Elements of both the ghost story genre and the crime genre are shown to be used by Atwood to create a sense of uncertainty in the narrative structure of the novel. It is argued that this sense of uncertainty is part of Atwood's use of a sylleptic narrative structure to achieve an authorial position that keeps Author and scriptor simultaneously in play. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from Bowen's ‘Anglo-Irish’ identity as a mark of the split self, I trace her literary exploration of non-belonging by looking at how her early work, above all in the short story, draws her uncannily close to the neo-gothic problematic of the ghost story. Examining her short fiction in the 1920s and 30s, I argue that Bowen's ghostly writing ultimately reaches towards an encounter with something impossible, a point of radical otherness lying beyond the legible surfaces of ‘belonging’, be they those of nation, class, identity or heterosexual legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Often in modernism, minds are rooms. In Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Isabel Archer resides between the ‘four walls’ of her husband's mind. In what is perhaps that novel's most crucial chapter, Isabel sits solitarily in a room, thinking alone and only thinking. What the episode also illustrates, therefore, is that minds in modernism are also often streams: stream of consciousness is a familiar term within modernist literary criticism. Fittingly, the term originates in the work of Henry's brother, William James, in the chapter of The Principles of Psychology (1890) titled ‘The Stream of Thought’. What are we to make of these seemingly incongruous expressions of mind, the room static and stationary, the stream immersed in continual flux? Proceeding via close readings of both The Portrait and The Principles and tracing especially William's portrayal of the airy gaseousness of consciousness and his suspicion that the stream of thought is really a stream of breath, this article finally arrives at a figure for interiority borrowed from the philosopher Michel Serres: a ‘syrrhesis’, a flowing together, a knotting of the torrent even as it streams. In such a figure, room and rivulet finally combine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Speech act theory, as inaugurated by J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962), has generated two distinct traditions of such theorizing. One is associated with John Searle and analytic philosophy. The other is represented by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, both in their literary studies and in their reflections about politics and society. A Searlean speech act is rational, predictable, bound by rules and conventions. It leaves intact the rules and conventions that enable and authorize it. For de Man and Derrida, in somewhat different ways, each performative, even though it may repeat forms of words used innumerable times before, is singular and inaugural. It changes the rules and institutions themselves, indeed all the surrounding context, rather than simply depending on them to get something efficiently done. Henry James's ‘The Aspern Papers’ would seem to have little to do with such distinctions. The story appears, as its preface suggests, primarily to have to do with history and, more particularly, with literary history. The story itself, however, shifts from the focus on the recovery through narrative of the recent historical past to a focus on the responsibility towards Juliana Bordereau and her niece, Tina, the narrator incurs when he tries to wrest the Aspern papers from them. The narrator wants knowledge of Aspern's liaison with Juliana the papers presumably contain. What he never understands, though the reader is given the opportunity by the story to understand it, is that history, at least history in the sense of the life experience of a great writer, cannot be objectively known. It can only be known from the inside, to to speak, in an act of doing and of taking responsibility for that doing, that repeats the episode from the past that is to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]