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In the early 1880s, Henry James made the transatlantic aesthete his own despite the figure's increasing association with Oscar Wilde. Though James privately dissociated himself from Wilde's artistic, sexual and identity politics, vestigial markers remain apparent in James's fiction. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Wilde situated his art theory in reaction to that of James and James McNeill Whistler, defining an oppositional aesthetic through a process of imaginative review-as-revision that aimed to mitigate Realism's vivisectionist tendencies. This chapter marks the demise of Aestheticism and the beginning of James's decadent turn. First, it analyses the language of puerility and animality that pervades James's and Wilde's interaction. It then charts the manner in which, post-1895, both authors recuperate this idiom to describe an innocent and erotic child of power that radically undermines Aestheticism's moral stance. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and De Profundis replicate and interrogate the unmitigated state of moral crisis that resulted from Wilde's trial. In this final crisis, both narratives radically reassess Aestheticism's central tenets, particularly its uncoupling of the aesthetic and the moral.

This chapter proposes a new understanding of the importance of French-naturalist literary influence for Henry James, and thereby, of the configuration of Jamesian narrative form, and the role of his experimental “middle period” in clarifying its contours. It argues that James’s main objection to naturalism (particularly the work of the Goncourts and Flaubert) lies in the “cruelty” with which it negates the aspirations of its characters. However, contrary to the orthodoxies of literary history, Jamesian “point of view” is only ostensibly based on a liberal commitment to respecting individual perspectives. Through a new reading of The Turn of the Screw, which shows it to expose the blueprint and rationale of Jamesian plot in general, the chapter suggests that Jamesian narrative pursues the apparent indulgence of desire while undercutting it through formal means. The exposition of James’s text, drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis, indicates the meaning of a concept of cruelty for the latter theory.

This chapter presents a discussion on linguistic turn. The notion of a literary turn might sound implausible in a different way. Uses of Literature poses as an intellectually progressive, non-reductive book about the contemporary value and importance of literature, in which Jacques Derrida has apparently been airbrushed out of the picture and out of history. The literary turn would be at once about the ‘literary in theory’ and more specifically about new ways of registering the place of literature in the light of Derrida's work. The literary turn can be tracked according to three interrelated modes or registers. Two words for Henry James, two words from Henry James, in place of a conclusion apropos the literary turn. The Turn of the Screw might seem very much a land-text, a novel told in a house, about a house, and about what haunts so-called home-territory.

This chapter analyzes the depiction of children in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898). The novel follows two orphaned children, Miles and Flora, who were born in India and taken under the care of their grandparents. When their grandparents died, the children were then brought to England by their uncle, and were cared for by an inexperienced governess who was given “supreme authority” over them. The novel dramatizes the abuse of adult authority in the name of “forming” children's souls and social and intellectual behavior, thereby confirming the adult's construction of reality—even sanity—and justifying the adult's power and moral virtue. Throughout the narrative, the children attempt to achieve conventional childhoods.

This chapter maintains that one legacy of the transformations in sexual ordering exemplified by the Wilde trials (1895) is an estrangement of ways of imagining sex otherwise: outside of solidifying taxonomies of hetero and homo, and in configurations unauthorized by those identities and their codings of the body's capacities for pleasure, perturbation, and attachment. Drawing from the literature of the period, and from contemporary queer scholars like Christopher Castiglia and Molly McGarry, the book generally gathers an archive of uncreated futures and possibilities that would not result into being. The chapter explains how the becoming-legible of homosexual identity made the world more rather than less habitable for some, richer in possibility, wider, and freer. It explores Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, in which he portrays a time and place where the signs of a specifically sexual signification supersaturate the lifeworld.

This chapter assesses how much novels can reveal about the various mechanisms underlying human consciousness. Some might say, very little, and argue that only scientific study can uncover such mechanisms. However, because language plays such a key role in shaping human consciousness, the fictional explorations of the human condition that we find in novelistic literature can greatly add to our scientific understanding by concretizing that condition in its diverse forms. The chapter also explores a related question: how much do novels draw on new insights about the nature of consciousness, so increasing their ability to inform us about the human condition, and its relationship to changing forms of society? The best novels have a complexity and ambiguity of meaning that itself reflects the many contradictions in society and the individual psyche within that society. Importantly, this means there can be multiple readings of great novels, with different readers interpreting them in various ways. The chapter then examines several novels that have multiple interpretations and which also illuminate and enhance our understanding of different aspects of consciousness. These include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995).