Stupid Sensations: Henry James, Good Form, and Reading Middlemarch Without a Brain

This essay returns to James's intertwined roles as reader, critic, and writer, analyzing Eliot's Middlemarch with James and within contemporary discussions of sensational reading. The brain is, after all, an organ, as James himself emphasizes in "Is There Life After Death?" And the form of the novel is not ideal or abstract but, as "The Art of Fiction" tells us, that of "a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism."