...Samuel Cross This essay closely examines Henry James's notion of “tact”—caution in what one says about others—treating the idea from an ethical perspective. I trace James's ethics of tact through his late The Wings of the Dove , arguing that the author holds himself to certain stringent standards...

... euphoria of the July Monarchy observer, who had shuttled from streets to theaters to apartments, into the elegiac melancholy of an enclosed and isolated narrator, whose con- tact with the urban crowd never claimed to transcend his own omniscient subjectivity" (144). In "interiorization," public life...

... Freud’s reading of Schreber and Dick’s reading of Freud. In Dick’s hands, Schreber’s illness immediately becomes science fictionalized as perhaps not illness at all but as potential con- tact with a macrocosmic world beyond empirical comprehension—precisely the move Dick himself makes with respect to...

...-government—“I hardly can tell how to govern myself” (148)—within a context of oppressive domestic con- tact: “I am beset on all Hands” (81). In order to achieve self-­government, and ulti- mately to govern others, Pamela needs to fend off the embrace of the domestic body, to disembed, eventually to...

... second time, lightens the mood with her assertive tact. After regaining control of the discourse, she holds forth with “a smooth surface of talk about Chicago, New York, their differences and their recent spectacular changes” (42). Clare's urban comparisons display a transatlantic reach, but it is her...

..., drawing on the work of Wolfgang Iser, calls the “cunning reader” (81). Defoe uses “writerly tact” (82) in appealing to both the general and the specialist reader by creating problems that Crusoe must solve through combinations of technical detail and common sense. The reader shadows Crusoe’s trials...

... redemptive power of books qua books. Culture with a capital "C," as we'll explore below, is something that the school system, booksellers, and commodity marketers of all kinds suggest can be bought: but NOVEL I FALL 2005 it's finally ineffable, like the "tact" that Matthew Arnold says...

... him in con- tact with no variety of impressions, circumstances, or ideas,” out of his “small circle” and into the political nation, where he learns “to feel for and with his fel- low citizens” and becomes “consciously a member of a great community” (328). In contrast, Grace and Giles’s...

...- tact zone is useful because it allows one to think the persons involved in the en- counter as separate from the temporality of the recorded narrative; it encourages the consideration of the terms of the different worlds to which each actor is na- tive. Lennox sees that the structure of the...