Play Is the Thing: Affect and Affordances in Alice, William, and Henry James

Abstract

Literary scholars have argued that the mid-1890s were a turning point for Henry James’s fictional technique, marking a period when his fiction eschews the encounter with physical places and persons for the “bodiless” realm of the modern novel of interiority (Kurnick 3). Virginia Woolf is among these observers. Commenting on James’s story “The Friends of Friends,” in which a character continues to serve as the story’s focalizing consciousness even after she dies, Woolf writes,