Abstract
This article reconsiders the representation of “things” in Henry James’s fiction with a reading of his 1897 novel The Spoils of Poynton. I argue that while the aristocratic characters employ various hermeneutics to interpret and thus claim the titular spoils, the things themselves exert agency by withdrawing from these interpretations. Using Graham Harman’s object-oriented realism, I read James’s things not as evidence of the humans who use them, but rather as entities that must be understood independently of their relations to humans.
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