Scratching at the Surface: Understanding History through Style in James’s Italy

Drawing attention to the immediate beauty of language and the distracting superficiality of ornate expression, James offers style as a means for representing and contemplating Italy. This essay argues that an emphasis on stylistic surface illustrates how contemplations of Italy dramatized a distinct struggle of James’s writing career: how to balance the perceived necessity of plot, read as an historical impulse, with the rich surface of style, understood as an embrace of extra-temporal spectacle.