Articles and Essays
James’s critical essays bring historical depth and close reading to questions of literature, religion, and moral imagination in the nineteenth century.
“The Real Anne Lister.”
European Romantic Review. In press. | 2025
“Literary Institutions as Arbiters of Culture.”
European Romantic Review. 35.3: 603-608. | 2024
“Sexualities” in The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose. Ed. Robert Morrison. (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 723-738. | 2024
“Thinking about the Minor with Charles Lamb.”
The Wordsworth Circle. 51.3: 322-37. | 2020
“Imitating Keats: The Case of Thomas Hood.”
Keats-Shelley Journal. 67: 87-95. | 2020
“Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara, 1834.”
BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (August) | 2019
“How Buddhist is Western Buddhist Literature?”
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight. | 2016
“Verse vs. the Novel.”
The Oxford Handbook to The Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). 589-605. | 2013
“England: Literature and Culture.”
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Vol. 6. The Nineteenth Century, ed. M.A.R. Habib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 172-87. | 2013
“Sexual Politics and the Performance of Gender in Romantic Poetry.”
A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (New York: Blackwell). | 2011
“Elizabeth Gaskell's Keats: The Romantic Poet, Sexual Transgression, and the Novel.”
Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, ed. Mark Sandy and Andrew Radford (Aldershot: Ashgate) 85-102. | 2008
“Introduction” to The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy (New York: Barnes and Noble) | 2006
“Introduction” to The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler (Barnes and Noble) | 2004
“The Victorian Novel and the Material World.”
Studies in the Novel. 37: 2 (Summer) 223-31. | 2005
“‘Contributions to Almighty Truth’: Stevie Smith's Seditious Romanticism.”
Twentieth-Century Literature. 49:4 (Winter) 472-93. | 2003
“Canonicity, Marginality, and the Celebration of the Minor.”
Victorian Poetry. 41:4 (Winter) 570-4. | 2003
“Romanticisms, Histories, and Romantic Cultures.”
College Literature. 30:3 (Summer) 139-50. | 2003
“‘Greater Love’: Wilfred Owen, Keats, and a Tradition of Desire.”
Twentieth-Century Literature. 47:1 (Spring) 20-38. | 2001
“Buddhism, East and West.”
Religion and the Arts. 4:4 (Fall) 547-55. | 2000
“Matthew Arnold, Our Contemporary.”
Nineteenth-Century Prose. 27:1 (Spring) 75-82. | 2000
“Arnold's Irony and the Deployment of Dandyism.”
Humor and Victorian Culture: New Perspectives on the Comic Spirit, ed. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Aldershot: Ashgate) 191-204. | 2000
“The Private Life of the Victorian Novel.”
Victorian Review. 24: 1 (Summer) 69-76. | 1998
“Books, Aesthetics, Markets, and Debts.”
College Literature. 25: 3 (Fall) 157-71. | 1998
“Gnawing at History: The Rhetoric of Holocaust Denial.”
Midwest Quarterly. 39: 1 (Fall) 74-89. | 1997
“‘Curl’d Minion, Dancer, Coiner of Sweet Words’: Keats, Dandyism, and Sexual Indeterminacy in Sohrab and Rustum.”
Victorian Poetry. 35:1 (Spring) 23-42. | 1997