ABSTRACT
It is commonly and powerfully assumed that James, even at his most realist in the 1880s, was not spurred on by any direct and impassioned relationship to the political and social events of his day. Despite recent work on James in terms of his involvement and implication in racial and sexual politics and national formation, this view is in many ways correct. However amenable to consciously politicised reading or however traceable to different political crises and events, the explicit focus of James's texts is firmly elsewhere. None the less that explicit and often melodramatic focus is utterly informed by historical events. The Bostonians may not be a novel 'about' the American Civil War but it is unthinkable without it. 'The Figure in the Carpet' may not be 'about' the Wilde trials but it is also, in its oblique way, utterly saturated with them. The Golden Bowl may not be 'about' American imperialism but that imperialism is what, from its first page, makes the novel possible and, perhaps more importantly, is what the novel also, in its small but dense way, helps to facilitate.2
