Teckyoung Kwon has written a wide-ranging, deeply learned study that combines perceptive readings of four seminal texts by James—The Portrait of a Lady, Turn of the Screw, The Ambassadors, and The Beast in the Jungle—with a remarkable grounding not only in literary theory and the critical literature but also in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. A key element of Kwon’s argument is the influence on Henry James’s fiction of his older brother William’s treatise, The Principles of Psychology, whose psychology of consciousness complements Freud’s psychology of the unconscious. I strongly recommend this book to scholars of James, literary modernism, literature, and psychology.

Peter L. Rudnytsky, University of Florida

This book forms a fresh and innovative contribution to a line of research that has examined continuities between the philosophy of William James and the fiction of Henry James. Rather than focusing on the pragmatism that informs the work of both Jameses, as Richard Hocks, Ross Posnock, and Gregory Phipps have done, Kwon’s study joins Paul B. Armstrong and others in bringing to bear the insights of modern neuroscience on the Jameses. Specifically, Kwon demonstrates how ‘surplus emotion’ is actualized in Henry James’s ‘ghosts,’ and how the discovery of the role played by ‘mirror neurons’ in empathy sheds light on the novelist’s use of free indirect discourse, which enables readers to identify more readily with a focalized character. This book makes a crucial intervention in James studies and in narratology.

Gert Buelens, Ghent University