Henry James's Perpetual Mediation.

Starting with a reading of James's lesser-known tale "The Special Type" (1900), this essay explores how James sustains and inhabits "types" as recognizable objects for readers to think and feel against. The construction of types in James's fiction provides a dialectical mechanism of making abstracti...

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Published in:Henry James Review Vol. 47; no. 1; pp. 104 - 121
Main Author: Men, Chunlin
Format: Article
Published: Johns Hopkins University Press Winter2026
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        au: Men, Chunlin
        affil: Beijing Foreign Studies University
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        James, Henry, 1843-1916
        Mediation
        Dialectic
        Special Type, The (Short story)
        Literary characters
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          James, Henry, 1843-1916
          Mediation
          Dialectic
          Special Type, The (Short story)
          Literary characters
      ab: Starting with a reading of James's lesser-known tale "The Special Type" (1900), this essay explores how James sustains and inhabits "types" as recognizable objects for readers to think and feel against. The construction of types in James's fiction provides a dialectical mechanism of making abstractions that I would call "perpetual mediation"—an unfinishable and unpredictable process that indexes a potentially collective existence or a categorical space through an individual character, but the connection between the character and the category remains perpetually subject to questioning and re-making.
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