The Henry James Review

What difference does it make to map globalization along the axis of time rather than the axis of space? This essay tests that possibility, focusing on pre-national time and exploring it through a genre-based paradigm, inspired by Adorno and especially Lukacs. Adorno and Lukacs see genres as diachronic forms giving each individual work a backward as well as a forward extension. The ancient epic and the modern novel continually interact and must be read in tandem if literature is to be seen as a cumulative, global phenomenon. James's novels are global in just this way: looking back to The Odyssey and forward to Erza Pound's Cantos.