ABSTRACT
Luke Seaber proposes an alternative to Umberto Eco’s distinction between open and closed fabulae, one in which ‘the end result is imposed by the fabula but the path taken to read it is not’, to account for James’s literary experimentation. James’s extratextuality, ‘his ability to foresee and control readers’ actions in the world outside the text’, not only provokes fear appropriate for a writer of ghost stories, but also locates James as a significant literary innovator of the early twentieth century. James’s ghost stories should not be relegated to this genre of fiction, but deserve to be redefined as a vital and innovative intervention in modernism.
