Search

Prototype theory, which argues that categories have graded (and thus fuzzy) membership based on prototypes, has been used as cognitive evidence to support moral particularism because if categories (in moral rules) only have fuzzy conceptual boundaries, moral rules are not enough for moral judgment, as specific situations also need to be considered to determine how these fuzzy categories should be understood, which is what moral particularism believes. The importance of literature for ethics, especially for moral imagination, has also been extensively discussed because literature can provide vivid examples for us to imagine different moral dilemmas, the consequences of different moral choices, and the feelings of different people facing different situations. Martha Nussbaum specifically argues that the literary form is the only adequate form to imagine certain complex moral situations. By analyzing concrete literary examples as well as the related ethical discussions and empirical findings, this article argues that, building on Nussbaum's argument, prototype theory can serve as a cognitive basis for the importance of literary form for moral imagination, because the literary form's tolerance of ambiguity suits how we ambiguously categorize the world., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Zheng.)

This paper examines patriarchal perception in Henry James' novella Daisy Miller. The novella does not provide objective presentations of the characters; instead, the narrative presents a subjective depiction, mostly of Daisy Miller, according to the inner thoughts of only one character, Frederick Winterbourne. Yet Winterbourne is not technically the narrator; his thoughts are disclosed by an unknown character in the story some time after the story occurs. Winterbourne's subjectivity being relayed through another character-narrator portrays Winterbourne's perceptions without explicitly analyzing his behavior. I argue that this complex narrative structure transparently divulges pre-established patriarchal notions that affect Winterbourne's perceptions of Daisy, thus executing a social critique. For example, Winterbourne's familial, social, and geographical circumstances construct a patriarchal distribution of information. Geneva, where Winterbourne develops his beliefs of male-female relations, has its own standards for women's behaviors that include abiding by propriety and submissiveness. Winterbourne's relatives, such as his aunt, attempt to prohibit interaction with Daisy because her behavior deviates from this template. Winterbourne subjects Daisy to oppressive classifications, and his observations of her reflect his proclivity to establish a "formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller" (James 12). He holds various notions of Daisy from "American flirt" (James 12) to "young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect" (James 60). All of these notions and formulas result from a pre-established patriarchal metric that Winterbourne adopts and inherits via the patriarchal distribution of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of telegraphy and diction in Henry James' "In the Cage," a novella about language. Topics discussed include the appearance of the language of measurement in the introduction to the telegraphist and her work, the language describing the telegraphist's fiancée, Mr. Mudge, and symbolism of the telegram.

Copyright of Humanitas: International Journal of Social Sciences / Uluslararasi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Humanitas: International Journal of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper attempts to develop a comprehensive analysis of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady from the perspective of spatial theory. It analyses the houses Archer settles down to expound that the physical surrounding constitutes not only the background setting but also the influential part of narration and character-shaping, explains how Archer deals with the conflicts between American and European culture through her marriage choice, revealing James' aspiration for cultural integration, excavates Archer's mental space to indicate her cognitive development of self-identification and growth from an innocent girl to a mature lady, so as to develop a profound understanding of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using notions such as aspectuality, metarepresentation, extended cognition, and distributed identity, which were first developed by cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind and later adapted to the study of fictional consciousness by cognitive narratology, this paper explores the social construction of Flora Saunt's identity in Henry James's 'Glasses' (1896). This short story is a fine specimen of a group of first-person Jamesian narratives which could be summarily characterised as tales of absent or effaced protagonists for the simple reason that their alleged central figures are seldom, if ever, directly available to the reader and mostly exist as sets of consensual or conflicted images lodged in the minds of other inhabitants of the storyworld. In the specific case of 'Glasses', for instance, an analysis of its cognitive make-up provides sufficient evidence to conclude that the construction of Flora as a vain, deceitful woman is heavily contingent on the gender peculiarities of the sources that represent and metarepresent her mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have focused on Vernon Lee's concept of aesthetic empathy; however, little attention has been directed toward the ways she deploys aesthetic empathy in her other writing. Lee demonstrates how empathy creates successful connections in art as well as in personal relationships, history, and travel. To show the connections across Lee's multi-genre work, this article examines how Lee's understanding of aesthetic empathy evolves, how her travel essays clarify her theory on empathy and put it into practice for her readers, and how Louis Norbert embodies her theory by creating emotional connections between authors, readers, and characters separated by time and space but united through imagination. The application of Lee's aesthetic empathy to fiction results in a narrative structure that utilizes conventions of the Victorian novel while presaging the developments of literary modernism. Aesthetic empathy transforms these genres, allowing Lee to communicate her ideas with a less technical readership. [148 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wilde and Chesterton may seem an unlikely pair. The overlap in critical diction between those who discuss modernist difficulty as playing tricks and those who discuss Chesterton's and Wilde's work as playing tricks is not coincidental. This article argues that the essay as practiced by both offers a new way to discern and articulate what it means for a text to be understood and to fashion itself as difficult. Both Chesterton and Wilde write form-visible, self-consciously stylized essays, provoking questions that parallel those surrounding modernist difficulty. Through their essays both coerce a critical posture of constant uncertainty as to whether what one is encountering is illusory, substantive, or somehow both. To differing degrees they leave readers with a sense of the substantive being made possible by the illusory. They caricature, magnify, and distend comprehensibility, making it if not less comprehensible less invisible. [142 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of the conception of that exemplar of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century urban modernity, the flâneur , have focused on both critique of the figure's masculinity and more radical and nuanced conceptions of women's flânerie. This article considers both the re-gendering and ungendering of flânerie in the character of three flâneuses in fiction published in the 1870s, 1880s and 1910s: Madame Sidonie, Henrietta Stackpole, and Elsie Bengough, and related dissonances and synergies in the career and work of London actress and cartoonist Marie Duval, active 1869–1885. It will argue that changes in types of reading supervened upon the boom in the production and distribution of serial publications during this period, resulting in the embodiment of new female professional identities, relative to both changing experiences of urban life and changing experiences of reading. The article makes a distinction between new ideas of these types of urban professional woman and the development of the identity of the New Woman after 1894. It examines the historic comprehensibility of the fictional flâneuses to readers of Zola, James, and Onions, according to the new opportunities and prohibitions that constituted the lived experiences of the developing urban entertainments industry of the period, in Duval's comic strips and vignettes in the weekly London magazine Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the conflict of cultures in James' fiction which is usually dramatized by a typical innocent American who is confronted by characters who represent sophisticated and somewhat crippling European traditions. This does not imply that James is against the observance of social manners. The heroine in Daisy Miller is condemned for being openly a flirt and she dies symbolizing her inability to adapt to European social standards. James is only against dogmatizing social conventions to the extent of restricting the freedom of individuals. Christopher Newman in The American retreats to America avoiding the evil and sophisticated Bellegardes in Paris without compromising his integrity. However, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady stands the challenge posed by European tradition. She is able to maintain her goodness and confront a world dominated by conventions and evil, although the price is quite high: it is her happiness and spontaneity that she has compromised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the high degree of parallelism and repetition that characterizes dialogue in Henry James's late fiction and considers both the function of such "consensual talk" in the context of James's novels and its implications for understandings of speech in the novel, more generally. Taking The Ambassadors (1903) as its primary case study, the article argues that dialogue's consensual structure is used to express a fantasy of reciprocity that is at once broadly attributable to the novel's speakers and to James himself, stung by the failure of his theatrical work and the lack of commercial uptake of The New York Edition. In particular, it draws on his 1905 lecture, "The Question of Our Speech," in which James conveys his aspirations that "conscious, imitative speech" could serve a unifying function in the social realm. Yet closer analysis of The Ambassadors reveals the extent to which James's theoretical ideals are at once dramatized and ultimately discredited in his fictional work. In the process, the article models a rhetorical approach to interpreting character dialogue, which treats it as an expressive affordance of the author as well as the character. In this way, it frames novelistic speech as less an instance of mimesis than poiesis and Jamesian dialogue as just one example of the ways fictional conversations get "made." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines immigrant perceptions and constructions of the past in Victorian Britain. It takes into account memorial practices and historical discourses from across a range of national, political and professional backgrounds, in order to highlight the points of conjunction between communities and cultural figures rarely, if ever, brought together in Victorian scholarship. To do this, it adopts a dual methodology, combining historical and biographical overviews drawn from different disciplinary areas with close attention to primary textual examples. Case studies of European revolutionaries such as Alexander Herzen, Peter Kropotkin and Karl Marx, and American expatriate authors such as Henry James and Mark Twain, are thus situated in a broader analysis of the production and consumption of private and public histories, inflected by considerations of ideology, degrees of integration and types of relation to the 'host' society. The foreigners who found themselves on British soil in the Victorian period created a web of relationships with memory and history, and only by engaging with the breadth and variety, as well as the specificity, of those relationships, can we begin to unravel the web's complexity. The essay takes the 'global turn' in Victorian studies in a different direction, and may be read as the first step towards a new theory of the Victorian immigrant experience of the past, based on an interrogation of the memory/history binary itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by cognitive narratology and specifically based on our metarepresentational ability, this paper explores how the subjectivity in Henry James's tales is transferred to the summaries provided by critics for the orientation of readers. Since it enables real, and realistic, minds to process content along with sources and paths of propagation, the metarepresentational skill proves to be an essential instrument for discriminating in narrative texts the authenticated, source-free facts from those which are contingent on the subjective domains of characters and character-narrators. When for a number of reasons this skill is relaxed or altogether deactivated in the act of summarizing, the resulting product will betray the original work by projecting a distorted or reductive image of it, particularly in a writer like James who was increasingly concerned with imparting informational verisimilitude to his fiction. The treatment of metarepresentational sources in the summaries of James's tales generates perplexing patterns, such as when the handling of sources in a summary contradicts the critic's own conclusions elsewhere in his or her work. This clash yields insights into the authenticating function of the fictional text in connection with its cognitive rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary fiction is a widely popular arena in which discourse on sexuality and queerness is produced and disseminated. The Gothic is an especially crucial mode in literary fiction that has a historically intimate relationship with queer subjectivity. Observing this relationship between Gothic fiction and queer subjectivity, in this article I analyze the representation of queer Gothic girlhood in contemporary fiction, taking as my focus John Harding's 2010 reworking of the Henry James classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898). I show how Florence and Giles develops familiar tropes attached to the figure of the queer child and look specifically at how readings of the parent text implicate contemporary readings of this figure. With close readings that draw on the queer feminist ethics of Lynne Huffer, I consider what seems to be happening to the figure of the queer Gothic girl in contemporary fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay challenges a certain trend in the Anglo-American reception of Lacan - namely, the tendency to either explicitly or implicitly section off his work on the literary from his attempts to present, in a non-metaphorical fashion, the mathematised structure of the psychoanalytic subject. It is, I argue, only when proper account is taken of Lacan's topologisation of the unconscious that the precise nature of Lacan's reading methodology - offered as an alternative to 'applied psychoanalysis' - becomes clear. The essay begins by noting the choice Lacan made in the 1970s to align the unconscious not with the symbolic (language and law) but with the real and outlines why the latter concept is best presented as a topological ex-sistence. Following an examination of the two topological qualities that define the psychoanalytic subject (the unlocalisable twist and the irreducible hole), the essay concludes with an explanation of the dense arguments proffered in two little read écrits on the subject of psychoanalytic literary criticism ('Lituraterre' and 'Preface to the Work of Robert Georgin') and articulates why the relation between the unconscious and literature is not akin to that between cause and effect but instead concerns a shared structural real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). It highlights the similarities, both in mindset and behavior, between the two stories’ devious and deranged first-person narrators, whose actions result in the death of a fellow human being. It further discusses the narrators’ fear and refusal of their own mortality, which finds expression in their hostility, and barely contained revulsion against a man (in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) and a woman (in “The Aspern Papers”), whose principal defining traits are old age and physical decay.

This essay reconsiders some critically established ‘germs’ for Henry James’s “The Death of the Lion” (1894), traced back to the 1893 demise of Guy de Maupassant and to the latter’s only visit to England in the summer of 1886. On that occasion, Maupassant was ‘chaperoned’ by his American friend Blanche Roosevelt, a well-known literary journalist in the London and Paris circles. The unexplored connection with Roosevelt invites a new reading which gives prominence to the American woman character in the tale (Fanny Hurter) and unveils an international subtheme within it. In light of such a reading, as well as of authoritative studies which have analyzed “The Death of the Lion” against the rise of modern literary journalism, I will also re-examine the role of the first-person narrator, an unnamed ‘repented’ literary journalist, in thwarting the possible relation between Neil Paraday and his American admirer.

Henry James’s self-allusions in “Pandora” have been read as a rewriting of his former treatment of the “American Girl abroad” in the comic mode. The hints at “a Tauchnitz novel by an American author” (90) establish an ironical reversal of the failures of understanding which had led to tragedy in “Daisy Miller.” Yet the ironies in “Pandora” are multi-layered, often self-reflexive, and can be further interpreted in the light of James’s controversial adaptation of his famous novella for the stage. In this framework, well-known Jamesian topoi appear both as a (self-)parody and a metaliterary dialogue James engages with his readers and critics. The author’s personal implication in this “American” story is further testified by his Notebooks, in which James states his intention to write about his friends Henry and “Clover” Adams. Indeed, “Pandora”’s multi-layered intertextuality includes undeclared references to Adams’s anonymously published novel, Democracy, a semi-satirical account of U.S. political life. My article focuses on the web of intertextual relations woven in this short story with a view to reflecting on James’s ideas concerning the politics of authorship, readership, literary success, and the fate of the American Girl.

The paper focuses upon the history of Henry James’s life-writing. Three main reasons for Henry James’s high priority for biographers are proposed: (1) James’s ambivalent attitude to the craft and ethics of literary biography; (2) paradoxical combination of James’s extreme privacy with huge epistolary legacy; (3) intriguing scenario of his postmortem popularity, determined by a specific way of self- fictionalizing. The contribution of such scholars as Leon Edel, Frank Kaplan, Sheldon Novick, Lyndall Gordon et al. is analyzed. Proliferation of biofictions about Henry James in 2000s (David Lodge, Colm Toibin, et al) is viewed as a result of James’s conscious automyth-making, which correlates with fictional elements in academic biographies of James. Fictionalizing of James’s life in academic biographies manifests itself in miming James’s idiolect, emphasizing the most dramatic events of his life, in accentuating ethically ambiguous episodes. Recent rethinking of James (self)image is based on blurring his sexual identification and on disavowing of the myth of a totally self-sufficient artist. The current situation in James’s life-writing may be characterized by travestying impulse (Richard Liebmann-Smith) and deconstruction of the academic myth-making mechanisms working in the very process of James’s biography-writing (Michael Anesco). The complicated and multidirectional (often reversive) process of myth-making and myth-destruction seems to be symptomatic of the current situation with Henry James life-writing. And that obviously sets it apart from an earlier state of matters (1990—2000s) when fictionalizing determined the main vector of the process.

Dans "Maud-Evelyn" (1900), Henry James met en scène l’improbable mariage d’un aristocrate anglais désargenté et d’un fantôme. Décédée alors qu’elle n’était encore qu’une enfant, Maud-Evelyn Dedrick se voit offrir, par ses parents endeuillés, une vie posthume dont le point culminant est son union avec Marmaduke. Parvenus ainsi à trouver un héritier à qui transmettre leur immense fortune, M. et Mme Dedrick meurent à leur tour, bientôt suivis par Marmaduke qui laisse in fine son héritage entre les mains de son amie et confidente, Lavinia. La vie imaginaire de Maud-Evelyn aura donc d’abord servi à perpétuer la fortune familiale : toujours déjà absente, celle-ci apparaît comme la femme idéale et semble conforter la logique nécrophile qui sous-tend l’économie patriarcale de l’Angleterre victorienne. La revenance de cet étrange fantôme génère cependant une série de troubles dans le genre qui viennent contrarier la dynamique héréditaire censée régir la circulation des richesses pour lui substituer un modèle de transmission que l’on pourrait qualifier de queer. Dans l’un et l’autre cas toutefois, la lecture vise la mise au jour d’un secret supposément dissimulé dans les plis du récit et l’interprétation postule que l’absence est le signe paradoxal d’une présence cachée. Or la structure du conte empêche cette herméneutique du soupçon en même temps qu’elle l’encourage en ne cessant pas de différer l’accès aux "trésors extraordinaires" accumulés en mémoire de Maud-Evelyn qu’il ne nous sera jamais donné de contempler. Pour finir, c’est la "légende" de Maud-Evelyn elle-même, l’idée d’une absence toujours présente, qui prend la forme d’un quasi-objet au gré de sa circulation entre les personnages, le narrateur et le lecteur.

This paper looks at the work of two famous American brothers: William and Henry James. The purpose of this research is to identify and discuss the nature of the relationship between the two brothers. This has been done by examining the psychological essays of William James and the critical essays of his brother, Henry James, as well as the correspondence between them. The bond between the novelist (Henry James) and the psychologist (William James) grew into the creation of the James literary and psychological heritage.

With this review, we aim to show the value of a recently published volume, that portrays a 19th-century American lady, Caroline Fitzgerald, living in Henry James’ cultural and intellectual environment. Thanks to unpublished letters and a detailed investigation of her life, the author allows us to follow the dreams, aspirations and travels of this unconventional lady, along with those of her two brothers.

Henry James, in his novel The Portrait of a Lady, builds a world around a main character who temperamentally and then circumstantially appears to every chance for happiness, especially when compared with others. As many critics have noted, Isabel Archer experiences tragedy because of this great potential for fulfillment rather than in spite of it. However, what critics have tended to overlook is the other parallel, though “minor,” irony of the novel: her friend Henrietta Stackpole’s fulfillment and move to England. The infamous ending of Isabel can be better understood by looking at it through the lens of intercultural competence and by comparing it with that of Henrietta. Building off the theory of unconscious versus conscious cultural identity that James sketches in his essay 1878 “Americans Abroad,” this article analyzes the role self-consciousness and awareness of cultural differences in the development of the novel’s characters.

The article highlights the influence of the novelists and philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the emerging and development of the modern novel as a free and outstanding form of literature, and what is more – as a form of art. The paper points out the impact of such names as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett and Malcolm Bradbury, personalities that sought to change the status of the novel through their works. Due to these authors there appeared and flourished the tradition that we now name the “modern” novel. By the turn of the century, the novel was shifting to art; it was becoming a more interesting and more influential form of literature; it was aspiring to become a far more complex, various, open and self-conscious form, one which, in a new way, sought to be taken seriously as “art”.

This article focuses on the diplomatic use of language in Henry James’s late novel The Ambassadors, where the American family envoy attempts to entice the son and heir back home, away from his refined social circle and a life of pleasure in Paris. However the venture fails to meet the requirements traditionally expected of an ambassador’s mission. The protagonist soon finds to his dismay that his interlocutors are not playing the game according to the rules, that his straightforward speech is defeated by their ambiguous replies and that their duplicity precludes his using the rhetorical art of persuasion. Taking his cue from their behaviour, he switches from speech to reserve and observation, becoming alert to non-verbal signs likely to assist him in his quest for meaning. The goal of our analysis is ultimately to investigate the way in which the theme of diplomacy serves the novelist’s representational purposes and to identify the meeting-points of the two arts.

Conrad inspired seven memoirs, published between 1926 and 1981, by his wife Jessie, his two sons (Borys and John) and three colleagues who knew him well: Ford Madox Ford, Richard Curle, and Joseph Retinger. Their viewpoints range from reverence and awe to condescension and hostility. Torn between focusing on Conrad and telling their own story, the memoirs are personally biased, have a strong element of self-interest and reveal more about the authors than the subject. No matter how inaccurate or self-aggrandizing, these memoirs are valuable sources for his biographers, who mine the gold and reject the dross, correct the errors and establish the truth. They describe domestic details, narrate important events in his life, reveal his strange character and portray the culture in which he lived, competing in trying to present the authoritative view of Conrad. [136 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis critics put on race, militarism and empire is common in Kipling studies. Captains Courageous, Kipling's tale of cod fishing, seems remote from such concerns yet is considered an imperialist text. Kipling claimed it was intended as a satire on the "grubby ideals" of the corporate class, their destruction of traditional ways of life such as those in the Anglo-India Kipling left behind. Most critics are unwilling to grant Kipling's assertion credence. Locating the book in the context of his American writing more broadly offers a new basis on which to revisit Kipling's claim and provides a fuller understanding of the novel's rarely remarked afterlife in 1890s America. It was a favourite of Theodore Roosevelt but also taken up by William James who was far removed from belligerent imperialists and hypercapitalists. A wider America of Kipling's imagining is found in Captains Courageous, one more complex than imperialist readings present. [150 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is on the Venetian essays of Henry James's travelogue Italian Hours. Although critics of James, as well as the writer himself, have relegated his travel writings to the margins of his canon, this article reconsiders James's travel writing as a literary cartography, a primary site in which the author is actively theorizing his concept of the "direct, artistic impression." A central argument is that the Jamesian impression is structurally and functionally similar to a hologram, a three-dimensional, extrarepresentational form that affords James's map of Venice its unique ability to capture fleeting moments, point-of-contact experience, and the immediacy of wonder. A rhizomatic organizing pattern allows James's literary cartography to function as a true hologram and enables the text to chart impressionist potentialities of Venice rather than geographic certainties, favoring obscurity over cartographic clarity. Subverting traditional cartographic practice of the nineteenth century, James's map of Venice defamiliarizes landmarks, disorients the reader, and converts known space back into an ill-defined state. A geocritical approach allows the Jamesian impression to be read as both an observed state of wonder and a self-expressive textual subject, a performance of a new space rather than a representation of one known. Thus, James's impressions are not static representations of place but rather emergent processes, allowing the travelogues to be read as a type of critical human geography where the boundaries between material space and acts of representation are blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Print literature has always existed in an ecosystem of media forms, among which the attention of audiences have been shared. Periodically, however, novelists have expressed concerns for the charms of literature in relation to its competitors. This article explores three interrelated experiments that harness the effects of authorial presence to revive the capacity of literary fiction to detain readers. Henry James's 'The Death of the Lion' (1894), Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers (2015) speak to each other by mobilising the trope of the author in ways that probe the fault lines in under-nuanced accounts of the author's coercive role in delimiting the meaning of a literary work. These texts, I offer, reimagine the author not as a disciplining force but as a compelling figure, working in distinctive ways to summon readerly attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what ways do anthropologists study vitality? Located in a familiar anthropological predicament—a return to a once familiar place like a field site after a significant gap of time—this article argues that in ways ranging from the everyday question "How are you?" to the familiar research tool of the household survey, we are already implicated in the study of vitality. Rather than a precise definition of vitality, this article offers the idea of life force as a dimension, analogous to space and time that anthropologists and their interlocutors inhabit and investigate. Drawing on the ethnographic strangeness of mundane alterations over time and with help from the Henry James novel The sacred fount , this article offers three critical issues in the anthropology of life force: the desire to know and to measure life force; subsequent doubts about life force, including whether or not it exists at all; and vampirism and envy in transactions of life force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of ideology in the construction of absent characters in Henry James’s short fiction against a methodological background of cognitive narratology and the attendant notions of metarepresentation, extended mind, and distributed identity. Building on the conviction that those minds that communally assemble absent characters by projecting subjective images of them do form identifiable ideological systems rather than arbitrary arrays, an approach to the construction of absent Louisa Brash in “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) is made in the context of “Daisy Miller” (1878), “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), and “The Next Time” (1895). Published in three different decades, these stories display absent and quasi‐absent characters who are conjured up for the reader in much the same way as Mrs. Brash is, namely as functions of a priori ideological positions based on sequenced degrees of commitment to the thematic dominant of a tale, a process that often results in deeply conflicted identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]