Bloomsbury Revisited: Empire and Jews in The Golden Bowl

I argue that The Golden Bowl confronts and entwines a scrutiny of empire and the Jewish question. The Golden Bowl stages a refutation of the era’s antisemitism by transposing the Jewish question from France to the imperial Anglophone world, and in doing so the novel addresses the European past, the Anglo-American future, and the attendant political formations of nation-state and empire. Prior accounts of Jewishness in James’s work have given lesser attention to his late period aesthetic. I focus on The Golden Bowl because of its deployment of the high style of James’s late period, because of its occurrence at a moment of politicized antisemitism and imperial expansion, and, finally, because the aesthetic and the political become inseparable in this novel.