The Function of the Imagination in the Writing of Henry James: The Production of a Civilized Experience

Kovács highlights James's early critical essays on contemporary French realism because they illustrate the emergence of what Kovács calls a triadic model of understanding: the linkage of sense experience, its translation through imagination, and the process of giving the imaginary construction meaning by giving it a form. She argues that the imagination produces the "real" for James and that his insistence on the constitutive role of the imagination in our experience of reality distinguishes his work from the reductive empiricist epistemology of most other American realists of his time. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)