Abstract
This study offers a reading of Henry James's 1869 travel essay ‘From Chambéry to Milan’, and argues that James's text uses the occasion of travel to Italy to pose a variety of phenomenological, epistemological and aesthetic questions. Such reflections become especially concentrated when James visits the home of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Chambéry and senses the ghostly' remainder of its former inhabitant's past as somehow embedded in the physical objects of the present. Upon arrival in Milan, the essay then gives an account of James's visions of the monumental nature of the city's Cathedral in terms of Walter Pater's theory of impressionistic perception and Kant's philosophy, as set forth in the Critique of Judgement. Concluding with a visit to the aesthetically rich space of the Milan Opera House, the essay seems to suggest that, in the end, these experiences of Italian travel are an important source for the development of James's theory of fiction.
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