Kendall Johnson: Henry James and the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xv + 246. Cloth £ 50.00

This book would have benefited from a sub-title, for ‘the visual’, though carefully chosen, does not indicate the author’s specific focus on the role of visual perception, representation and classification in the formation of American cultural identity. Anyone expecting further exploration of the visual arts in James’s work will find little reference here to painters and sculptors, actual and fictional. Instead there is a great deal of interest in more widely diffused visual images, in cartoons, drawings and photographs, especially as these illustrate contemporary interest in human types and specimens, in Punch and Harper’s Weekly, in George Catlin’s volumes on the North American Indians. No Bronzino or John Singer Sargent, then. Johnson is more interested in lining James up alongside the emergent ‘social sciences’ represented by figures such as Louis Agassiz (whom Henry’s brother William accompanied on his Journey in Brazil), Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas. ‘Broadly speaking’, he writes, ‘visual experience in James’s fiction dramatizes the transition from a feudal sensibility to one of free market citizenship’. This transition is indeed endlessly ‘dramatic’, in so far as James’s writing disowns the possibility of the sovereign perspective to which it might seem to aspire.

Seiten 432 - 434