Abstract: This article attempts to demonstrate that Henry James’s 1873 travel essay “Roman Rides” displays a high degree of a particular kind of “ecological awareness,” which does not merely consist of attention to any naïvely conceived “natural” world. Instead, with the resources of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and its ecological implications that Timothy Morton has drawn out, this article shows how James’s dramatizing imagination in “Roman Rides” allows readers of the text to make “indirect contact” with real, non-human objects, not in any immediate present but only through the irregular, looping time into which James’s essay invites us.
Henry Carmines (Sun,) studied this question.