ELH

This essay looks at the iconography of the telegraph in Hnery James's major phase, and seeks to understand The Ambassadors as exemplary of his fascination with "the idea of connectibility." The essay also inquires more broadly into the means by which technologies of communication become objects of emotional attachment, affective intensity, and even sensuous engagement. Reading across a range of period represetations of the telegraph, the essay shows how James's stylistic prodigality/-/-his "magnificent and masterly indirectness," as James himself calls it/-/-travesties a telegraphic economy of expression, even as his narratives fixate on the inscrutable pleasures of mediated communication.