Abstract
This article reveals Henry James’s commitment to professional connoisseurship as a means of asserting control over a mass reading public. Focusing on The Outcry (1911), James’s last published novel, it demonstrates the author’s deployment of connoisseurial strategies to produce a text that, perhaps surprisingly, turns away from the performance of authorial nuance. A related strand of analysis situates The Outcry within the cultural and social context of the Edwardian art drain, the period of time when a significant number of British-owned art objects were sold to museums and private collectors, most often in the United States. I argue that in this text, James seizes upon the figure of the professional connoisseur as a cultural hero and proxy for the novelist author. At the same time, he makes a point of celebrating and promoting the autocratic power exercised by this figure. Although The Outcry is often disregarded as a simple, even superficial work, these moves articulate a complex manifestation of class conflict, aesthetic training, and cultural power. They simultaneously reflect James’s late-in-life conviction that connoisseurship might itself serve as a literary strategy for seeing and shaping meaning.
Sustaining the Lives of Art Objects