A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner.

The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and grew to become an informing idea for a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Describing the post-Euclidean intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension works with the concepts derived from the mathematical possibilities of n-dimensional geometry—co-presence, bi-location, and interpenetration; the experiences of two consciousnesses sharing the same space, one consciousness being in two spaces, and objects and consciousness pervading each other—to examine how a crucially transformative idea in the cultural history of space was thought and to consider the forms in which such thought was anchored. It identifies a corpus of higher-dimensional fictions by Conrad and Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others and reads these closely to understand how fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature shaped and were in turn shaped by the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. In so doing it traces the intellectual history of higher-dimensional thought into diverse terrains, describing spiritualist experiments and how an extended abstract space functioned as an analogue for global space in occult groupings such as the Theosophical Society.

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Henry James and the Art of Impressions

10.1093/oso/9780198853510.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

John Scholar

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Immanuel Kant ◽

Cultural History ◽

Henry James ◽

David Hume ◽

John Locke ◽

William James ◽

Judith Butler ◽

Main Theme ◽

History Of

Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.

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