Grammars of Time in Late James

Mainly from the perspective of ‘The Jolly Corner’ and The Sense of the Past, this article examines aspects of Henry Jamesʹs lifelong preoccupation with the historicity of time at the logical, grammatical, and narrative levels. Jamesʹs relative sense of time and his experiments with time-travelling characters are related to William Jamesʹs concept of the saddle-back present, Otto Jespersen, and the intricacies of modality, tense, and time, and some of the work of Albert Einstein, James McTaggart, F. H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, and others. It is argued that this experimental sense of time was a casualty, in part, of Jamesʹs reactions to the First World War and the failure to find analogies for it.