http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/graham-storey_2018.jpg
'Charisma' is a word we can't seem to avoid, yet it only acquired its modern currency when it migrated from theology into social thought in the 1920s. In the years after World War II it became an important concept for the influential American critic Lionel Trilling and his thinking about the novelist Henry James. James could have not have known the word 'charisma' - he died in 1916 - but he was much interested in the potency of 'charm' and the uses to which it could be put, in public and in private, as matters of performance, style, and the incitement of passion. This lecture will explore James's insight into some emergent features of his world that have come to dominate ours.
Adrian Poole is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written on novelists including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James, and he has edited the Cambridge Companion to English Novelists. He is one of the General Editors of the Complete Fiction of Henry James for Cambridge University Press, and is himself editing 'The Princess Casamassima'.
