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Intimacy and Form: James on Hawthorne's Charm
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2007
- pp. 120-139
- 10.1353/hjr.2007.0008
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.