Dr. James Lello
Biography
I am 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, and I am currently working on a book-length study of Henry James and the art of tone. Other ongoing projects include: philosophical prose style - especially William James and F.H. Bradley, Herman Melville’s Clarel, Robert Browning’s Metaphysics, Gertrude Stein's split infinitives.
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 2 (Tragedy), 15 (The Ethical Imagination) 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.
Connect with James
Publications
Essays
'Henry James's Rhythms', English Literary History, vol. 92, no. 4 (Winter 2025), 1079-1107. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/977605/pdf
'Henry James's Tones of Time', Review of English Studies, vol. 76, no. 326 (October 2025). https://academic.oup.com/res/article/76/326/396/8198902
'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 Fiction, 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/