To Speak for Itself: The Urban Specter in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl

Abstract: Henry James’s cities palpitate with psychology and physicality. These cities act as conversational subjects; they are traces of the urban past that appear and haunt a character’s present. This essay takes up Agamben’s urban specter and James’s own theorizing of urban representation in the New York Edition’s Prefaces in relation to The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl . From London and Venice to the unidentified “American City,” James’s novels ultimately reveal how cities enact their own past and future consciousnesses in the present day, irrevocably shaping the subject’s psyche and remapping the urban landscape.