The Princess Casamassima: Jamesian (Urban) Gothic and Realism

The exploration of Jamesian Gothic has, understandably, focused on his “ghostly” tales, most notably The Turn of the Screw. Yet Gothic-oriented criticism has left aside novels and tales which might usefully be read “Gothically” as a means to yield insights, not only into the text themselves, but possibly into the relationship between realism and the Gothic. Gothic imagery and its “sense of darkness and suffocation”, for instance, is overwhelmingly present in the famous forty-second chapter of...