"Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself": James's Mediators.

This essay traces its author's changing understanding over forty-five years of critical engagement of the many James protagonists who like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors fail often deliberately to "get anything for themselves" out of the affairs in which they are enmeshed. With reference to developments in James studies since the 1980s the essay describes its author's own shift away from once-standard narratives of renunciation to his present re-casting of these characters as "mediators"—James's representatives in his radical even utopian effort to imagine alternative less violent and appropriative forms of intimacy relation and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]