Jamesian Ecosystems / Jamesian Organisms (Henry James Society Tenth International Conference, Vancouver, BC)
In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), Henry James writes, “A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.” In the same essay, he conceives of the novel in geographical terms, cautioning that “The critic who over the close texture of a finished work will pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial ... as any that have been known to history.” James’s conception of the novel as a “living thing” inhabiting a physical landscape invites us to think about the writer and his work in terms of relationships between organisms and their environments.