John Scholar

My research bridges Victorian and modern literature, looking at how intellectual history can help us understand the changing form of the novel. My first book, Henry James and the Art of Impressions (OUP, 2020), places the fiction and non-fiction of Henry James in dialogue with an interdisciplinary history of the 'impression', drawing in philosophy, psychology, the visual arts, and modern critical theory.

My interest in the relationship between literature and philosophy has also prompted work exploring how continental philosophy (Heidegger, Bergson) can historicize modernist form in James Joyce's Ulysses, especially its representation of the material world and the 'stream of consciousness'. I am also interested more broadly in the fin-de-siècle, modernism, and narrative theory.

My research interests include literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis, James Joyce, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf.