John Scholar

My research spans Victorian and modern literature, looking at how intellectual history can help us understand the changing form of the novel.

My first book, Henry James and the Art of Impressions (OUP, 2020), placed fiction and non-fiction of Henry James in dialogue with an interdisciplinary history of the 'impression', drawing in philosophy, psychology, painting, and modern critical theory. I argue that James tried to wrest the impression from the impressionists and to recast it in his own art of the novel in order to represent the most intense moments of consciousness of his characters.

My interest in the relationship between literature and philosophy has also prompted work exploring how continental philosophy (Heidegger, Bergson) can historicize modernist form in James Joyce’s Ulysses, especially its representation of the material world and the ‘stream of consciousness’.

I am currently in the early stages of writing a book about the intersections of economics, psychoanalysis and the novel between the two world wars. I am interested in how these modernist discourses vied with each other to make sense of aggression, including the role of money in conflicts between sexes, classes and nations.