To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.

This chapter describes some of the salient characteristics of the ‘preface essay’, a form with a long history that has not received sustained critical attention. With reference to existing theories of the preface by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida as well as important examples of the form by authors mainly in the English literary tradition, ranging from John Dryden, through William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and to Zadie Smith, this chapter provides a conceptual framework for authorial preface essays, their generic characteristics, and what they reveal about the relationship between the prefatorial and the essayistic. It will argue that the preface essay is a space of authorial self-crafting that attains durability and literary value by combining aspects of the prefatorial, such as its dependence on the work it prefaces and its occasionality, with the essayistic movement from the specific to the general, and the particular to the abstract.

Attending to the tropological imagination of Progressive Era U.S. immigration, this chapter maps what Michel Foucault calls “the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body” to narrate a queer history of the social body itself. In so doing, the chapter animates a variety of period figurations of mass immigration—including racial indigestion and race suicide—to trace a new genealogy of the literary erotics of Asian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, the ethnic groups that most threatened the whiteness of the social body. Reading across representations of immigration in the works of Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far, Jennie June, Emanuel Carnevali, and Emma Lazarus, this chapter shifts the history of sexuality from one located in individual bodies to theorize a sexuality of the population.

It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

My introduction makes four closely related arguments: that the promise functions as the governing trope of James’s work, that James rearranges the moral landscape of the nineteenth-century novel, that the depictions of promise-giving in James’s fiction challenge a number of moral philosophy’s accounts of the nature of obligation, and that the relation between morality and literature is better posed in terms of form than in terms of content. I explore a range of ethical dilemmas posed by philosophers working in moral philosophy, speech act theory, and the philosophy of identity. In addition I sketch out a short history of the nineteenth-century novel, focusing on the centrality of the promise to British, French, and American writers.

This chapter explores the literary 1890s as a stage where new character types were established and exploratory formations of narrative emerged. Before the radical turn into modernism, work was already being done to deconstruct nineteenth-century forms of fictional realism, to inflect its shapes and patterns. The work of Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather sowed seeds that bore fruit over the next decades. Thus, Chopin was fascinated by the human margin, by varieties of behavior that suggested new configurations of sensuality and transgression. Stephen Crane proffered a purgation of nineteenth-century prose, developing a stripped-down realism that connected “the real” to a documentary discourse. In Cather’s early writing a fascination with female performance was allied to an interest in European movements such as Aestheticism and Symbolism. Linking both subjects, her focus on a sensory writing pointed forward to a modernist fascination with embodiment.

In James’s late tales, he offers a critique of his own procedures, raising to an absurd pitch one of his most characteristic structures of feeling: the determining power of an absent cause, as his characters contemplate something that is not only hidden from view but is constitutively unavailable for direct representation. This structure, I argue, is fundamentally about the veiled social relations of the all-dominating money culture James found in The American Scene. James’s work thus takes shape against the background of an economic world that is less represented than it is formalized as the very structure from which it seeks autonomy. If the “Beast in the Jungle” and The Sacred Fount offer the most negative version of this autonomy – works that fail to engage the world around them – The Golden Bowl tells a different story, consistently gesturing towards a series of determining social contexts it nevertheless withholds from the reader’s view. In this way, James shows us how the fine discriminations in which he is invested rest on a set of real-world determinations that his characters are constitutively unable to see.

This chapter discusses Roth's literary influences, and explores how Roth himself negotiates multiple forms of influence. It acknowledges the impact of specific predecessors and contemporaries on Roth's work, such as Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, James, and others, while also exploring less-often acknowledged literary influences such as Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Finch’s chapter argues that the rhetorical artifice in Wallace Stevens’s poetry may be best understood through the concept of manner. In contrast with style, which focuses on the personal signature of a writer’s work, manner refers to the more social, public aspects of a writer’s rhetorical bearing. Drawing on a range of critics who have theorized aesthetic manner and the politics of manners, including Pierre Bourdieu, Giorgio Agamben, Henry James, and Lionel Trilling, this chapter proposes that Stevens’s interest in textiles and clothing, in figurations of nobility, and in the mannerist syntax of repetition are not just neutral aesthetic traits but expressions of a sensibility tied to social categories that include class and race. After examining these intersections in poems spanning Stevens’s career, Finch closes by suggesting that the most meaningful approaches to Stevens’s formal prosody should remain attentive to the social posture and cultural tones of his language.

This chapter reads The Golden Bowl and The Waste Land as semaphores for the felt weakening of twentieth-century British and European ascendancy. James’s exquisitely managed novel and Eliot’s encyclopedic poem are not just documents of disintegration, but new totalizations on new architectonic principles. In their respective treatments of shattering, salvage and re-composition, they point to new world orders still only partially emerging into view during the decades immediately after World War I. American wealth and the transfer of art from Europe to America is The Golden Bowl’s subject; The Waste Land is concerned with the collapse of European culture and coherence. However, as James became 'the master' of the English novel and Eliot 'the Pope of Russell Square' American attempts to manage what Europe could no longer do became as evident in cultural as in political fields. After World War II, the United States would proudly reclaim these émigré writers and establish new 'Great Books' and “World Literature' courses to reflect its ambitions as the Cold War era’s major superpower.

Rounding out the previous chapter’s treatment of Victorian narrative with the early modernist prose of Henry James, analysis returns to the ontology of language in Agamben, leading on to a more philologically oriented history of prose – pivoted on the Enlightenment rise of the “plain style” – in research by John Guillory. Such is a mode of discourse whose potential stranglehold on future developments in literary writing is contrasted with a recovered premium on the densities of rhythm and sonority. Literary examples extend from Whitman’s insurgent lexical poetics, through D. H. Lawrence’s grammatically impacted style, to the stripped-down phrasal ironies of Kazuo Ishiguro – before returning to Friedrich Kittler on the ideologies of speech as medium in the post-Enlightenment century. Discussion closes with an adapted Heideggerian model for the present-at-handness of language itself in medial disclosure – rather than just in scriptive use.

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).

William James was one of the most influential American psychologists and philosophers. His writings remain thought-provoking and relevant more than a century after his death. His seminal ideas range from free will, determinism, the nature of consciousness, the mechanisms responsible for our emotions, religious and spiritual experiences, psychic phenomena, and the veracity of mediumship. This chapter focuses on what is less well known, that behind the appearance of success he lived a life burdened with recurrent depression, hypochondria, and myriad physical afflictions, most of them psychosomatic in nature. His search for a career path was long and torturous. At different stages in his life, he was a frustrated artist, a reluctant physician, and a drifter. He found his calling in teaching. His lifelong search for the nature of the mind and the soul was deeply entangled with his father’s, whose tragic and accidental loss of a leg in childhood led to a relentless lifelong quest for “real” answers. The chapter also touches on Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godfather, and includes brief descriptions of William James’ famed novelist brother, Henry James, Jr., as well as his sister, Alice James, the brilliant reclusive diarist.

Twain’s two most important contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells was a friend and champion of both writers, although Twain and James expressed distaste toward each other. Each in his own way was an important figure in the emerging literary realism. Although Twain claimed that he preferred reading history and biography over novels and literature, he was an avid reader of his contemporaries’ works, even if he often criticized them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was his next-door neighbor, and he entertained fellow writers in his Hartford mansion. Twain was a champion of some younger writers, although he wearied at the constant demands for advice and help from emerging writers.

In the 1880s, the New York-based Century Magazine was a regular home for Henry James’s fiction and criticism. His first major intervention on the theory of fiction in the magazine is his July 1883 essay on Anthony Trollope (published over a year before Century printed his now canonical consideration ‘The Art of Fiction’). The essay represents, perhaps unsurprisingly, a highly nuanced view of the literary scene in which allegiances circle and return and reputations are diminished and then rebuilt. Trollope’s posthumously-published autobiography appeared three months after James’s essay and seemed to confirm many of the latter’s anxieties about the business of writing. This chapter explores James’s contorted reading of Trollope as a literary precursor who is both criticised for his immoderate, promiscuous productivity and, at the same time, recuperated as a moderate sensibility standing opposed to the scientific avant-gardism of the French naturalist tradition. By exploring the complex national allegiances of an American author writing in a proudly American journal about a recently-deceased, and highly popular, English novelist, I consider the ways in which James attempts to carve out for himself a transatlantic space where the metaphoric possibilities of moderation and its antonyms find a restless purchase.

This chapter considers the role of form in debates related to the reconfiguration of novel’s place in the 1880s literary field. To do so it turns to three cultural debates underpinned by questions of form: the distinction between the healthy and the unhealthy house in relation to the International Health Exhibition (1884); the distinction between healthy and unhealthy novels in a series of 1884 essays on the novel by Walter Besant, Henry James, and George Moore respectively; and the distinction between healthy and unhealthy novels in relation to print censorship and the Henry Vizetelly trial and debates (1888-89). Taken together, these debates illuminate how form was reconfigured for the reading public in the 1880s to at once enhance and challenge the role of the novel as a vital and consequential social force. They also illustrate the ways in which frameworks for evaluation were tested, explored and refined in ways that continue to reverberate for literary studies today.

Amanda Golden addresses Plath’s pedagogical strategies in order to shed new light on the ways that her identities as a student, teacher, and poet overlap. Focusing on her teaching of modernism, including the work of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Henry James, Golden shows how Plath’s later writing refashions the language she used as a teacher. Golden draws heavily on the teaching notes Plath made whilst working in the English Department at Smith College, combing through Plath’s lists, lectures, and the passages from critical texts that she highlighted.

This chapter traces how critics of women's rights, and especially of women's political rights, used arguments about the limited and dependent role of the female sovereign to minimize the queen's feminist potential, and to erode faith in the larger aims of the women's movement more generally. It focuses especially on the later decades of Victoria's rule, from the 1860s, when anti-suffragists were particularly zealous in their efforts to mobilize Victoria for their own alternative purposes.