ABSTRACT
Travel provided James with a shrewd intellectual outlook which allowed him to institute his personal and professional mastery, embolden his perception, boost his creative powers, and store his impressions for fictional deployment. For him, travel is not only a cultural practice of movement but also a consolidation of authority. This chapter explores different modes of James’s self-inscription in A Little Tour in France (1900) and Italian Hours (1909). It also suggests that such modes culminate in autoethnography in The American Scene (1907). James’s self-inscription allows him to assume authority, showcasing the continuity between his experience of selfhood and his authority as an empirical witness, often driven by the “ethnographic impulse.” The discussion highlights James’s immersion in his travel narratives as a character, interacting with an experiential repertory rather than with actual humans. It also attempts to demonstrate James’s placement of himself within traditions of travel writing, consolidating his authority by circumventing the overwhelming control of John Ruskin and by invalidating the “defenseless” aspirations of George Eliot. Finally, the chapter illustrates the autoethnographic turn in The American Scene with focus on James’s diegetic status, as well as embodiment and reciprocity, which transform him from a “recalcitrant” to a “vulnerable” observer.
