James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

Mahler’s “lifelong romance with death” (Stuart Feder) was one of his central preoccupations, both in his creative work and in his day-to-day existence. Death is ubiquitous in Mahler’s music, from his first major work, Das klagende Lied, which concerns fratricide and its consequences, to the unfinished Tenth Symphony, in which the final movement reproduces the sound of funeral drums. Privately, it was not only something to be feared but an experience to be desired; the lines “sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben” (I will die, in order to live), the first line of the final strophe of Mahler’s Second Symphony, encapsulate a worldview that he renewed wholeheartedly in the Eighth. The various influences on this orientation are surveyed here, with special attention to poets (Goethe, Klopstock, Rückert) and philosophers (Fechner, Hartmann) who intensified what seems to have been a natural predilection.