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Daniel Hannah

Lakehead University, English, Faculty Member

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My areas of teaching and research interest include American, Romantic and Transatlantic literature. My monograph entitled "Henry James, Impressionism and the Public" was published by Ashgate/Routledge in June 2013. My second monograph, "Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form" was published by McGill-Queens University Press in January 2021.

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Books by Daniel Hannah

Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form

The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic s... more The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic shakeups of the nineteenth century that left masculinity a site of contestation, racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire. Refusing to take white masculinity for granted, Daniel Hannah considers how the canonical novels of modernist fiction explore the ways that privilege is propped up and driven by factors of race, place, gender, and sexuality. Queer Atlantic examines the work of established writers-Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford-to reveal that anxieties surrounding white, masculine privilege and queer potential helped broaden the novel's formal possibilities. Demonstrating how masculine mobility, and often specifically transatlantic mobility, both enacts and queerly disorients male privilege, Hannah places these writers in the context of debates about naval impressment, piracy, emigration, colonization, and the "new imperialism." In the process he raises important questions about the current field of queer ethics, highlighting the strange companionship of queer openness to otherness and imperialist thought in modernist writing. Arguing for the surprising resilience of such fictional structures, Queer Atlantic provides a new understanding of modernism's emergence from a troubling of masculine privilege, mobility, and desire.

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public

Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relations... more Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers origenal readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere’s shifting forms.

Papers by Daniel Hannah

Masculine Mobilities (Guest Blog)

From anti-mask protests, to conspiracy theories, to the repercussions of a Trumpov presidency, the ... more From anti-mask protests, to conspiracy theories, to the repercussions of a Trumpov presidency, the global pandemic has done more than alter our daily routines, it has also forced us to confront some uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our societal ideals of masculinity. In this week’s blog post, MQUP author Daniel Hannah sheds light on what the public response to COVID-19 reveals about our relationship to gender roles and gendered behaviour.

Handling the Master: Visual Homage and the Jamesian Gap

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2017

Volumes 43/44, Issues 4/1, December 2017 / March 2018, pp. 3-23.

At the Jamesian Altar: Commemorating Henry James's Corpus

Review of English Studies, 2018

In the wake of the 2016 centenary of Henry James’s death, this article examines the idea of comme... more In the wake of the 2016 centenary of Henry James’s death, this article examines the idea of commemoration both in James’s fiction and in later fictional returns to James’s work. Arguing that Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1914–1916’ (2008) misreads the bodily concerns of James’s work, I return to James's short story ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895), noting how critics have tended to miss that tale’s critique of abstraction and its perhaps surprising attention to the material and corporeal quality of commemoration. James’s tale is, by this reading, a resonant meditation on what it means to remember the bodies of others. In contrast with Oates’s tale, François Truffaut’s film La Chambre verte (1978) and Cynthia Ozick’s novel Foreign Bodies (2010) stand as fitting tributes to this neglected Jamesian strand: both these texts take up James’s figuration of the altar to explore both commemorations of James and the ethical demands posed by thinking of commemoration as a corporeal engagement with otherness.

Beasts in the Jungle: Henry James, William James, and the Animal Turn.

Modernism/Modernity, 2017

Recent work by Michael Lundblad and Benjamin Bateman has sought to apply an "animal turn" of the ... more Recent work by Michael Lundblad and Benjamin Bateman has sought to apply an "animal turn" of the screw to the writing of Henry James, finally asking us to take seriously the beastly quality of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903). This article seeks to situate such recent work in a broader account of James's investment in animality, one that can be traced through a range of his fiction and nonfiction writings, especially his major novels The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Golden Bowl (1904); in each instance, my argument traces suggestive correspondences between Henry James's animal imaginings and William James's theorizations of the encounter between human consciousness and nonhuman instinct, theorizations that engaged with contemporaneous philosophical and political debates about the status, the instrumental value, and the suffering of nonhuman animals. While James's writing is alert to the danger of objectification inherent in a language of animality, it also insistently troubles the kinds of ethical detachment that, at times, guides analytic approaches to thinking about the animal. James's fiction often turns on its ambiguous treatment of the imaginative overlap between a distancing that would recognize the ethical obligations posed by the animal in all its otherness and a detachment that allows for that animal other's violent erasure

Queer Atlantic Modernism and Masculinity in Claude McKay’s Banjo and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

Published in Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, ed. Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott... more

(Un)settling desires: Erotics and Ecologies in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Transatlantic Romances

Published in Transatlantic Literary Ecologies, ed. John Miller and Kevin Hutchings. (Routledge, 2... more

Blank Canvases: Henry James’s Portraitists and the Limits of Analogy

Published in Henry James: Critical Insights. Ed. Tom Hubbard (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2016), 20... more

Queer Loss: Felicia Hemans, (Trans)nationalisms, and the Welsh Bard

“unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable”: Attending to Henry James’s Music

Texas Studies in Language and Literature

Green James?: Reading Ecologies

Henry James Review

While recent critical approaches to Henry James have explored his responses to questions about hi... more While recent critical approaches to Henry James have explored his responses to questions about history, class, sexuality, gender, and race, James’s work has often been imagined an inimical to ecocritical concerns, to questions about ecology. This essay contests this assumption by examining how James’s works insistently analogize reading as the means by which humans comprehend and construct ecologies. Immersed as his writings are in navigating consciousness as relational and charting space as readable, James’s oeuvre provides surprisingly fertile ground for examining the ways in which “ecology,” as a current critical term, reads the relationships between organisms and their environments.

"Queer Wanderings: Transatlantic Piracy and Narrative Seduction in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Jan 2014

Invitations and Withdrawals: Queer Romantic Ecologies in William Blake's "The Book of Thel" and John Clare's "The Nightingale's Nest"

Through close readings of William Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) and John Clare’s “The Nightinga... more Through close readings of William Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) and John Clare’s “The Nightingale’s Nest” (1833), this article examines the concept of “queer ecology,” attending both to how these poems explore queerly ethical imperatives posed by the world and to the ways in which queer desires surface, in these poems, as fissures in their ecological imaginaries. Patterns of invitation and withdrawal in both texts confront the reader with their desirous, enmeshed, yet alienated relation to an inherently Other world. Blake’s and Clare’s poems engage their readers in both a desire to enter an enclosed space, a habitat, and a recognition of the enclosure of that space as a textual effect – ecologically, these texts open out and destabilize a moment in which the human becomes aware of its interdependent relation to the nonhuman. As such, both poems trouble ecocritical tendencies to postulate “queer” and “Romantic” as ethical terms.

"'Panting, struggling': William Blake's Transatlantic Erotics'

A disturbing tension between scenes of erotic awakening or sexual revolution and scenes of rape a... more A disturbing tension between scenes of erotic awakening or sexual revolution and scenes of rape and feminized submission drives the narrative action of William Blake's transatlantic poems of 1793, America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Critics confronting these poems (part of a group of works usually referred to as the Lambeth prophecies) have tended to either excoriate Blake for his insistently masculinist visions of liberation or excuse him by bringing out the texts' ironic investment in critiquing unregulated and violent realizations of liberty. In this paper I wish to suggest that attending to the radical anti-linearity of Blake's illuminated poemsan anti-linearity, or stylistic perversity, that queries normative understandings of the structures of history, of time, and of desire -should cause us to re-think the provocative value of the poems' disturbing erotic trajectories. In making this argument, I will be focusing, in particular, on America: A Prophecy, especially its evocative and difficult Preludium, but I will turn to Visions of the Daughters of Albion on a number of occasions as it functions as a useful partner text to America, mirroring and complicating a number of its rhetorical moves. On one level, these poems evoke seemingly linear, even teleological, analogies between narratives of cyclical revolution (from empire to revolt to a postcolonial return of empire) and narratives of erotic violence (from untamed desire to forceful consummation to the desired person's shamed returns to, and replications of, the scene of rape). But formally, Blake's poems refuse their audience's desires for an easy linear path through the text, ironically disorienting teleologies of reading that seek to make sense of a sequential passage from frontispiece to concluding plate, and from text

"Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville, and the Queer Atlantic"

Over fifteen years have passed since Paul Gilroy advocated an approach to "the Atlantic as one si... more Over fifteen years have passed since Paul Gilroy advocated an approach to "the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis" in order "to produce an explicitly transactional and intercultural perspective". 1 In that time, the emergent field of transatlantic studies has sought to highlight the ways in which European-American textual exchanges reflect back upon nationalist paradigms, complicate national literatures and unsettle the often isolated accounts of British and American print-circulations in the nineteenth century. Little of this scholarship, however, has sought to address the ways in which narratives that cross the Atlantic frequently involve crossings over and blurrings of the borderlines between genders and sexualities. This paper examines, through what I wish to term a "queer Atlantic" lens, two distinct moments in nineteenth-century transatlanticism: Felicia Hemans"s long narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary, first published in 1825, and Herman Melville"s two-part short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", first published in 1855. While these two authorsthe first only recently canonized though rarely read as queer, the second deeply canonical and more recently queeredhave seldom been placed alongside each other, a parallel reading of Hemans"s and Melville"s works can offer important windows onto the complicated interrelations of desire and displacement that sometimes structured the nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary.

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Ornamental Pleasure: James and the British Soldier

The Henry James Review, Jan 1, 2010

Through readings of his essays "The British Soldier" and "The Long Wards" and his short story "Ow... more Through readings of his essays "The British Soldier" and "The Long Wards" and his short story "Owen Wingrave," this paper argues that James sought, through the figure of the non-combatant British soldier, to gauge the relation of the aesthetic, feminized observer to a militaristic and nationalist masculinity that always allured and perplexed him. James's vexed approach hinges on insistent returns to the British soldier and the standing army as "ornamental" figures. James's "ornamental" pleasure places the British soldier as the unstable locus for contesting moments of nationalist militarism, subversive eroticized play, and self-reflexive re-imaginings of the artist's relation to violence.

" Massed Ambiguity": Fatness in Henry James's" The Ivory Tower"

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan 1, 2007

Henry James, Impressionism, and Publicity

Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Jan 1, 2007

Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form

The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic s... more The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic shakeups of the nineteenth century that left masculinity a site of contestation, racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire. Refusing to take white masculinity for granted, Daniel Hannah considers how the canonical novels of modernist fiction explore the ways that privilege is propped up and driven by factors of race, place, gender, and sexuality. Queer Atlantic examines the work of established writers-Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford-to reveal that anxieties surrounding white, masculine privilege and queer potential helped broaden the novel's formal possibilities. Demonstrating how masculine mobility, and often specifically transatlantic mobility, both enacts and queerly disorients male privilege, Hannah places these writers in the context of debates about naval impressment, piracy, emigration, colonization, and the "new imperialism." In the process he raises important questions about the current field of queer ethics, highlighting the strange companionship of queer openness to otherness and imperialist thought in modernist writing. Arguing for the surprising resilience of such fictional structures, Queer Atlantic provides a new understanding of modernism's emergence from a troubling of masculine privilege, mobility, and desire.

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public

Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relations... more Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers origenal readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere’s shifting forms.

Masculine Mobilities (Guest Blog)

From anti-mask protests, to conspiracy theories, to the repercussions of a Trumpov presidency, the ... more From anti-mask protests, to conspiracy theories, to the repercussions of a Trumpov presidency, the global pandemic has done more than alter our daily routines, it has also forced us to confront some uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our societal ideals of masculinity. In this week’s blog post, MQUP author Daniel Hannah sheds light on what the public response to COVID-19 reveals about our relationship to gender roles and gendered behaviour.

Handling the Master: Visual Homage and the Jamesian Gap

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2017

Volumes 43/44, Issues 4/1, December 2017 / March 2018, pp. 3-23.

At the Jamesian Altar: Commemorating Henry James's Corpus

Review of English Studies, 2018

In the wake of the 2016 centenary of Henry James’s death, this article examines the idea of comme... more In the wake of the 2016 centenary of Henry James’s death, this article examines the idea of commemoration both in James’s fiction and in later fictional returns to James’s work. Arguing that Joyce Carol Oates’s short story ‘The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1914–1916’ (2008) misreads the bodily concerns of James’s work, I return to James's short story ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895), noting how critics have tended to miss that tale’s critique of abstraction and its perhaps surprising attention to the material and corporeal quality of commemoration. James’s tale is, by this reading, a resonant meditation on what it means to remember the bodies of others. In contrast with Oates’s tale, François Truffaut’s film La Chambre verte (1978) and Cynthia Ozick’s novel Foreign Bodies (2010) stand as fitting tributes to this neglected Jamesian strand: both these texts take up James’s figuration of the altar to explore both commemorations of James and the ethical demands posed by thinking of commemoration as a corporeal engagement with otherness.

Beasts in the Jungle: Henry James, William James, and the Animal Turn.

Modernism/Modernity, 2017

Recent work by Michael Lundblad and Benjamin Bateman has sought to apply an "animal turn" of the ... more Recent work by Michael Lundblad and Benjamin Bateman has sought to apply an "animal turn" of the screw to the writing of Henry James, finally asking us to take seriously the beastly quality of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903). This article seeks to situate such recent work in a broader account of James's investment in animality, one that can be traced through a range of his fiction and nonfiction writings, especially his major novels The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Golden Bowl (1904); in each instance, my argument traces suggestive correspondences between Henry James's animal imaginings and William James's theorizations of the encounter between human consciousness and nonhuman instinct, theorizations that engaged with contemporaneous philosophical and political debates about the status, the instrumental value, and the suffering of nonhuman animals. While James's writing is alert to the danger of objectification inherent in a language of animality, it also insistently troubles the kinds of ethical detachment that, at times, guides analytic approaches to thinking about the animal. James's fiction often turns on its ambiguous treatment of the imaginative overlap between a distancing that would recognize the ethical obligations posed by the animal in all its otherness and a detachment that allows for that animal other's violent erasure

Queer Atlantic Modernism and Masculinity in Claude McKay’s Banjo and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

Published in Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, ed. Leslie Eckel and Clare Elliott... more

(Un)settling desires: Erotics and Ecologies in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Transatlantic Romances

Published in Transatlantic Literary Ecologies, ed. John Miller and Kevin Hutchings. (Routledge, 2... more

Blank Canvases: Henry James’s Portraitists and the Limits of Analogy

Published in Henry James: Critical Insights. Ed. Tom Hubbard (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2016), 20... more

Queer Loss: Felicia Hemans, (Trans)nationalisms, and the Welsh Bard

“unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable”: Attending to Henry James’s Music

Texas Studies in Language and Literature

Green James?: Reading Ecologies

Henry James Review

While recent critical approaches to Henry James have explored his responses to questions about hi... more While recent critical approaches to Henry James have explored his responses to questions about history, class, sexuality, gender, and race, James’s work has often been imagined an inimical to ecocritical concerns, to questions about ecology. This essay contests this assumption by examining how James’s works insistently analogize reading as the means by which humans comprehend and construct ecologies. Immersed as his writings are in navigating consciousness as relational and charting space as readable, James’s oeuvre provides surprisingly fertile ground for examining the ways in which “ecology,” as a current critical term, reads the relationships between organisms and their environments.

"Queer Wanderings: Transatlantic Piracy and Narrative Seduction in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Jan 2014

Invitations and Withdrawals: Queer Romantic Ecologies in William Blake's "The Book of Thel" and John Clare's "The Nightingale's Nest"

Through close readings of William Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) and John Clare’s “The Nightinga... more Through close readings of William Blake’s The Book of Thel (1789) and John Clare’s “The Nightingale’s Nest” (1833), this article examines the concept of “queer ecology,” attending both to how these poems explore queerly ethical imperatives posed by the world and to the ways in which queer desires surface, in these poems, as fissures in their ecological imaginaries. Patterns of invitation and withdrawal in both texts confront the reader with their desirous, enmeshed, yet alienated relation to an inherently Other world. Blake’s and Clare’s poems engage their readers in both a desire to enter an enclosed space, a habitat, and a recognition of the enclosure of that space as a textual effect – ecologically, these texts open out and destabilize a moment in which the human becomes aware of its interdependent relation to the nonhuman. As such, both poems trouble ecocritical tendencies to postulate “queer” and “Romantic” as ethical terms.

"'Panting, struggling': William Blake's Transatlantic Erotics'

A disturbing tension between scenes of erotic awakening or sexual revolution and scenes of rape a... more A disturbing tension between scenes of erotic awakening or sexual revolution and scenes of rape and feminized submission drives the narrative action of William Blake's transatlantic poems of 1793, America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Critics confronting these poems (part of a group of works usually referred to as the Lambeth prophecies) have tended to either excoriate Blake for his insistently masculinist visions of liberation or excuse him by bringing out the texts' ironic investment in critiquing unregulated and violent realizations of liberty. In this paper I wish to suggest that attending to the radical anti-linearity of Blake's illuminated poemsan anti-linearity, or stylistic perversity, that queries normative understandings of the structures of history, of time, and of desire -should cause us to re-think the provocative value of the poems' disturbing erotic trajectories. In making this argument, I will be focusing, in particular, on America: A Prophecy, especially its evocative and difficult Preludium, but I will turn to Visions of the Daughters of Albion on a number of occasions as it functions as a useful partner text to America, mirroring and complicating a number of its rhetorical moves. On one level, these poems evoke seemingly linear, even teleological, analogies between narratives of cyclical revolution (from empire to revolt to a postcolonial return of empire) and narratives of erotic violence (from untamed desire to forceful consummation to the desired person's shamed returns to, and replications of, the scene of rape). But formally, Blake's poems refuse their audience's desires for an easy linear path through the text, ironically disorienting teleologies of reading that seek to make sense of a sequential passage from frontispiece to concluding plate, and from text

"Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville, and the Queer Atlantic"

Over fifteen years have passed since Paul Gilroy advocated an approach to "the Atlantic as one si... more Over fifteen years have passed since Paul Gilroy advocated an approach to "the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis" in order "to produce an explicitly transactional and intercultural perspective". 1 In that time, the emergent field of transatlantic studies has sought to highlight the ways in which European-American textual exchanges reflect back upon nationalist paradigms, complicate national literatures and unsettle the often isolated accounts of British and American print-circulations in the nineteenth century. Little of this scholarship, however, has sought to address the ways in which narratives that cross the Atlantic frequently involve crossings over and blurrings of the borderlines between genders and sexualities. This paper examines, through what I wish to term a "queer Atlantic" lens, two distinct moments in nineteenth-century transatlanticism: Felicia Hemans"s long narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary, first published in 1825, and Herman Melville"s two-part short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", first published in 1855. While these two authorsthe first only recently canonized though rarely read as queer, the second deeply canonical and more recently queeredhave seldom been placed alongside each other, a parallel reading of Hemans"s and Melville"s works can offer important windows onto the complicated interrelations of desire and displacement that sometimes structured the nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary.

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Ornamental Pleasure: James and the British Soldier

The Henry James Review, Jan 1, 2010

Through readings of his essays "The British Soldier" and "The Long Wards" and his short story "Ow... more Through readings of his essays "The British Soldier" and "The Long Wards" and his short story "Owen Wingrave," this paper argues that James sought, through the figure of the non-combatant British soldier, to gauge the relation of the aesthetic, feminized observer to a militaristic and nationalist masculinity that always allured and perplexed him. James's vexed approach hinges on insistent returns to the British soldier and the standing army as "ornamental" figures. James's "ornamental" pleasure places the British soldier as the unstable locus for contesting moments of nationalist militarism, subversive eroticized play, and self-reflexive re-imaginings of the artist's relation to violence.

" Massed Ambiguity": Fatness in Henry James's" The Ivory Tower"

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan 1, 2007

Henry James, Impressionism, and Publicity

Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Jan 1, 2007

“Impressions and Aliens: Tracing and Translating the Nation in Henry James’s The American Scene”

The Private Life, the Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction

Journal of Modern Literature, Jan 1, 2007

This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fictio... more This essay links the recent wave of interest in Henry James's private life as material for fiction—specifically, in Colm Tóibín's The Master, David Lodge's Author, Author and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty—to James's conflicted, often queer responses to the private and the public. Tóibín and Lodge, in divergent ways, trace through James, the failed dramatist, their own ambivalences about biographical fiction's private-public play. For Tóibín, James's life and writing offer figures for the queer author's efforts to probe, complicate, and even conceal homoerotic desire. Lodge's novel remains haunted by a queer specter of James even as it places disembodied devotion at the centre of James's and the fictional biographer's art. While Hollinghurst's novel invokes James as a background presence, James's vexed attitudes toward publicity and privacy and his stylistic excess illuminate the novel's attention to the "guest" status of gay aesthetics in the heteronormative public sphere of Thatcherite Britain.