Henry James, Consciousness, and the Evolution of the Novel

Positioning Henry James within his transatlantic and pan-European contexts, Peter Rawlings relocates James and the New Criticism's ideology of organicism in biology rather than in aesthetics. He argues that the novel as a character-driven genre emerged from philosophical and scientific thinking about consciousness and that James's canonization must be reexamined in the context of the philosophical, physiological, and biological discourses on which he drew in his theory and practice as a novelist.