"Almost a Sense of Property": Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, modernism, and commodity culture

[extract] Metaphorical, if not literal, homelessness has seemed to many to be a defining condition of the life and work of Henry James. His friend Edmund Gosse, for instance, wrote that James was a "homeless man in a peculiar sense," one who was never truly settled either in England, his adopted country, or the United States, his country of origin.More recently, John Carlos Rowe has related James's deracination to cosmopolitanism, outlining how the concerns of his fiction foreshadow recent efforts within the humanities to renovate the cosmopolitan ideal of respect for international and intranational differences.And John Landau has argued that James's complex late style both highlights and attempts to compensate for a general sense of cultural "homelessness"—that is, the increasingly unstable "grounds" of belief and knowledge in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture.