1884: The Princess Casamassima, Anarchy, and Henry James's Materialist Poetics

This essay focuses on the year when Henry James's interests in the operational protocols of the mind, the aesthetic protocols of literature, and the protocols of political action coalesced in The Princess Casamassima to articulate an unorthodox conception of personal identity as shared property and to forge James's materialist poetics. What scholarship celebrates as the peak of James's novelistic method develops out of a network of underexplored influences: James's friendship with the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (and James's "corrective" borrowing from the Russian literary tradition); William James's theories of corporeal emotion; and Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist doctrine of amorphousness. In the anarchic (unorganized and impermanent) nature of consciousness James found the very condition of radical politics.