Introduction

Summary

The Introduction summarizes the book’s thesis and offers a survey of current critical thinking on Henry James and travel. Demonstrating how studies of the author’s oft-cited ‘international theme’ have tended to approach his treatment of journeying either in abstractly cultural ways or in terms of place or destination, it argues for the need to consider the process of travel in more detail and in its own right. The first half of the Introduction outlines the crucial role of transport throughout James’s life and career and his interest in the epistemological and relational value of both small-scale (urban) and transatlantic ‘comings and goings’. The second half of the Introduction considers James’s association with what I call an aesthetics of stasis, whereby certain pictorial or architectural conceits from his Prefaces, notably the house of fiction, have become dominant models in Jamesian criticism. As I argue, much of James’s style and aesthetic logic, including his complex use of metaphor, borrows rather from the idea of conveyance. In support of its claims, the Introduction provides short readings and exempla from a number of James’s fictions, including The Sense of the Past, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.