Henry James and the Past: Readings in Time

The present study attempts to recover issues of history, economics, and social change as specifically determinant in James's works of the 1870s and 1880s. These issues are focussed through James's negotiations of the Romance form at the onset of consumer culture: his concern with the production of literary effects are shown to be intimately bound up with the newly developing strategies of the marketplace. What emerges is a radical re-alignment in the nature of narrative as manufacturer registers contemporary reconstructions of the self within the emerging world of consumerism, a new critique of the female, and new authorizations of history within fiction.