Henry James and the Visual

Dr. Kendall Johnson grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as a therapist and crisis consultant-often in the field. As a psychologist and trauma specialist, he has written several non-fiction books and numerous articles on trauma and school crisis. He trained crisis teams and rendered direct support following numerous school shootings, natural disasters, and 9/11. As a nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescents to young adults. Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work in 2022 to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history. His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020, his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, and his The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022. His Fireflies series is published by Arroyo Seco Press: Fireflies Against Darkness (2021), More Fireflies (2022), and The Fireflies Around Us (2023). Kendall's shorter work has appeared in Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Literary Hub, MacQueen's Quinterly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and Shark Reef, and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

In the decades after the Civil War, how did Americans see the world and their place in it? Kendall Johnson argues that Henry James appealed to his readers' sense of vision to dramatize the ambiguity of American citizenship in scenes of tense encounter with Europeans. By reviving the eighteenth-century debates over beauty, sublimity, and the picturesque, James weaves into his narratives the national politics of emancipation, immigration, and Indian Removal. For James, visual experience is crucial to the American communal identity, a position that challenged prominent anthropologists as they defined concepts of race and culture in ways that continue to shape how we see the world today. To demonstrate the cultural stereotypes that James reworked, the book includes twenty illustrations from periodicals of the nineteenth century. This study reaches startling new conclusions not just about James, but about the way America defined itself through the arts in the nineteenth century.

Introduction: the cultural varieties of visual experience; 1. Classifying Donatello: the visual aesthetics of American exceptionalism; 2. A 'dark spot' in the picturesque: the aesthetics of polygenesis in Henry James's 'A Landscape-Painter'; 3. Rules of engagement: the arch-romance of visual culture in The American; 4. The scarlet feather: racial phantasmagoria in What Maisie Knew; 5. Pullman's progress: the politics of the picturesque in The American Scene; Epilogue: America seen; Bibliography.