Positioning Henry James within his transatlantic and pan-European contexts, Peter Rawlings relocates James and the New Criticism's ideology of organicism in biology rather than in aesthetics. Rawlings argues that the novel as a genre anchored in the representation of character emerged from philosophical and scientific thinking about consciousness and experience that begins in the late seventeenth century and encompasses two hundred years of traffic between Europe and America. His ambitious study explores the significance of American thinkers and their European antecedents, from Jonathan Edwards to Josiah Royce, aligning James's 1884 essay "The Art of Fiction" with contemporary thinking on consciousness and its dense, ramifying aetiology. By this point, Herbert Spencer had extended Darwin's evolutionary thinking into the social domain, disrupting ideas about consciousness as allied with the soul even as the fin-de-si
