Intimacy and Form: James on Hawthorne's Charm

James's early work Hawthorne (1879) offers an alternative model for formalism, in which an openly interested reader negotiates an affectively invested relation to the text, through a range of identifications and disidentifications with an imagined authorial subject. James outlines a critical project addressing as its central object of analysis Hawthorne's charm, an elusive quality that is neither simply an objective formal property nor a subjective impression. James's identificatory reading of Hawthorne's charm is finally concerned with imagining a sustainable position within an unresponsive culture, in ways that might encourage us to revalue the reader's intimate, imaginative engagement with the text.