Chapter 3 demonstrates how James uses railway journeys to dramatize the potentially endless and inherently sociable principle of narrative relations that he outlines in his Preface to Roderick Hudson. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The American Scene, I argue that these texts evince a particular concern with ‘stopping-places’, specifically invoking the railway’s associations with distribution and supply. In The Sacred Fount, relationships operate in ways that suggest the railway’s own temporal and alimentary economy, as the train journey opening the novel tropes a continuing disquiet surrounding social contact, as well as providing a context for its central concern about the transfer of ‘resources’. The second half of the chapter examines the representation of similar anxieties throughout The American Scene. From his seat in the Pullman railcar, James is perturbed by the sense of moving ‘without personal effort or suffered transfer’, associating the Pullman’s innovative continuity, in particular, with the difficulty of social and cultural differentiation. In essays like ‘The Future of the Novel’ James deprecates the railway’s role as an arbiter of literary and critical taste.

James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner sets the scene for the modern expression of the notion of the double in fiction. E. T. A. Hoffman’s novel The Devil’s Elixir covers a similar territory. In this chapter, these two novels provide the backdrop for an exploration of Dostoyevsky’s The Double. This is perhaps the most popular novel that deals with the concept of the double. I argue that the accuracy of the subjective experience of the double suggests that the authors probably had personal experience in autoscopy. This is particularly true of Guy de Maupassant in his novella The Horla. In these novels, the double has a physical existence independent of the originating self. This is true too for the novels by José Saramago and Shusaku Endo that deal with this subject.

Oxford classicist, lover of Renaissance art, Pater might seem to belong in a different atmospheric universe from that which presided over the emergence of intertextual theory in the Paris of the 1960s. While his name is virtually synonymous with subjective aesthetic response, the notion of intertextuality, first named and honed at the hands of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, is, by contrast, tightly intertwined with the idea of authorial impersonality. Yet these realms and modes of thought are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear, however starkly distinct their critical languages. Over the decades since his death, Pater’s work has given rise to considerable comment regarding his use of source material. This chapter examines Pater’s practice of ‘second-hand’ writing in ‘Style’ – in particular his borrowings from Flaubert and Maupassant – in the light of intertextual theory in comparison with the extreme citational practices of Flaubert and Joyce. Highlighting significant similarities and differences between their treatment of sources, it brings into focus the specificity of Pater’s drive to style the second-hand.

Tumultuous nineteenth-century political debates, fears of violent revolutions, and the rise of women’s rights campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France provide a context for considering Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and its engagement with feminism. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) identified sexual differences, male–male combat, and female choice in courtship as key elements of animal copulation, while insisting that male choice controls human sexual relations, ideas that inspired radically different reactions from feminists, who objected to what they regarded as Darwin’s sexism, and fiction writers, who highlighted women characters resisting patriarchal expectations and making independent decisions. The long history and profound consequences of the concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection call for careful consideration of the intertwining of Darwin’s scientific theories about sexual difference and choice with divergent cultural formations, ranging from social Darwinism to feminist theory, and propose a more fluid understanding of sex and gender that supersedes the earlier two-sex model.