Awkward Realism: Objects of Coercion in What Maisie Knew & The Awkward Age

Abstract

What kind of experience is it to read novels experimenting with the representation of the experience of meaning, like What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899); to read, that is, for what is felt as a necessarily objectified or presentified meaning, and then to reread for a meaning necessarily differential, as James’s Maisie and the sympathetic subjects of The Awkward Age find and lose themselves in doing? Secondly, what does our experience of this reading (and rereading) mean? On wh...