James's Browning Inside Out

This intensely close topological reading of James's reading of Browning situates it in its literary historical moments. These include not only the occasion of its first presentation and its 1914 publication in, curiously enough, Notes on Novelists, but also our encounter with it in the present, looking back with the awareness of how Browning's literary innovations have been exfoliated in the pages of modernist and postmodernist fiction.