Julia Decker (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
julia.decker.25@ucl.ac.uk

Eloquent Proportions: Henry James and the Architecture of Authorship

My research explores how Henry James’s architectural imagination organises his understanding of literary invention over time. Moving through the spatial logics of threshold, circulation, and habitation, it traces an emergent pattern anchored in specific working practices. Although the prominence of architectural imagery in James’s oeuvre has long been recognised, the wider significance of architecture within his artistic and intellectual formation has not been systematically examined. I propose that architecture provides James with a conceptual vocabulary for artistic becoming, through which the internal discipline of creative labour and the external perception of built environments are presented as mutually constructive. To develop this claim, the project engages nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural spaces by analysing visual and textual archives, including illustrated newspapers, museum histories, architectural commentary, and photographic material. Placing James’s non-fiction in dialogue with these historical contexts and related networks of aesthetic thought, architecture emerges as a central organising principle across his career. This reading opens a new perspective on the utility of Jamesian architecture and, more broadly, on the interplay between literary and architectural traditions in transatlantic modernity.

Principal Supervisor: Prof. Philip Horne