Dr James Lello, St Catharine's
jaehl2@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies at St Catharine’s College, where I also completed my BA, MPhil and PhD.
Research Interests
I work on British and American literature in the long nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on Henry James. My PhD explored the importance of ‘intonation’ in James's work; it argues that his handling of tone, rhythm, and cadence contributes towards a prosodic sophistication typically reserved for verse, and so contributes towards his broader aspiration to transform the cultural status of the novel. I am particularly interested in what happens when we no longer conceive of language, especially syntax and semantics, as the primary or even exclusive modes of expression. I am currently revising this for a book on Henry James's art of tone.
I am also preparing a second research project, provisionally titled: ‘Nineteenth-Century Philosophical Sentences’. This considers amongst other things William James’s sense of style, its literary reception, and the broader debates surrounding philosophical aesthetics during the period (with particular reference to British Idealism).
At undergraduate level, I teach Part I, Papers I (Practical Criticism and Critical Practice) and 7a (English Literature and its Contexts 1830-1945), and for Part II, Papers 15 (The English Moralists) and 16 (The History and Theory of Literary Criticism). I also co-run a series of wide-ranging seminars on critical theory 'from Plato to the Present Day' at St Catharine’s College. I have supervised numerous undergraduate dissertations on Henry James as well as on nineteenth-century aesthetics.
Selected Publications
Essays
'Henry James's Tones of Time', Review of English Studies, forthcoming.
'Henry James's Rhythms', English Literary History, forthcoming (2025)
'Catching the Note and Trick: James's Browning', Essays in Criticism (April 2024) https://academic.oup.com/eic/article-abstract/74/2/168/7716908?redirectedFrom=fulltext
‘Henry James and “The Auditive Intelligence”’, The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4 (December 2020), 313–332. https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article-abstract/49/4/313/6179165
'The Mystery of "Collaboration" in Henry James', Humanities , vol. 10, no. 1 https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020069
Reviews
Review of Henry James, The Prefaces, ed. Oliver Herford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), Review of English Studies (2024) https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res/hgae048/7739931
'Jamesian Footings', The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 52, issue 3 (September 2023), 316-322 https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article-abstract/52/3/316/7429034?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Review of On Style in Victorian Viction, ed. Daniel Tyler, Review of English Studies, vol. 73, issue 311 (2022), 799-801. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgac043
Review of Understanding James, Understanding Modernism’ ed. David H. Evans, Modern Language Review, no. 114, vol. 1 (2019), 129-30. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.114.1.0129
'Redemption of Existence', 3AM Magazine (2017) https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/redemption-of-existence/
