ABSTRACT
James tended to resist the realization that no style is absolute, no passion independent, no expression primary, no elegance free. But just as the meaning of a poem may be another poem (Bloom), the meanings of a novel may well lie in a subtextual elsewhere made of other novels, other essays, other poems. In this introductory chapter, I try to qualify the reading protocols of the deconstructive model (de Man, Hartman, Bloom, Hillis Miller) by reaching out to recent hermeneutic responses—by Horne, Poole, Felman, Follini, Bradbury, and Douglas-Fairhurst—to the problem of influence in James and Victorian studies more generally.
