English literature of protest shaped James’s radical consciousness before Marx did

Evidence

His other obsession was literature. This, too, was an emanation of the English bourgeoisie. For James, it had begun with William Makepeace Thackeray: “I laughed without satiety at Thackeray’s constant jokes and sneers and gibes at the aristocracy and at people in high places. Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1243

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the origin point of James’s critical consciousness as a product of bourgeois literary culture, not external critique of it.