The master and the dean: the literary criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

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Realism, Cultural Politics, and Language as Mediation in Mark Twain and Others

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300003744 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 8 ◽

pp. 183-195

Author(s):

Jules Chametzky

Keyword(s):

Cultural Politics ◽

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Life Itself

American classical realists in the period 1865–1900 sought, in one way or another, to grasp the essence of their new concern and method. William Dean Howells defined it as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Mark Twain claimed in the preface to his first book, “I am sure I have written honestly, whether wisely or not,” whereas Henry James (in The Art of Fiction, 1884) enjoined the aspiring writer not to “think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the color of life itself.” Truth, honesty, faithfulness to the “color of life itself”—what serious writer, in any period and writing in any mode, is not committed to those things? The problem, of course, lies in what we mean by each term, where the “material” and the “color of life” are, and by what standards (and by whom) they are to be validated. The resolution of those questions is a version of cultural politics.

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Tragic form and feeling in theIliad

The Journal of Hellenic Studies ◽

10.2307/631133 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 102 ◽

pp. 145-160 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

R. B. Rutherford

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Henry James ◽

Greek Tragedy ◽

Classical Literature ◽

Focus Attention ◽

Men And Women ◽

The Past ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

Narrative Techniques ◽

The Way

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

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A Structural Reading of the Chuan in the Wen-yüan ying-hua

The Journal of Asian Studies ◽

10.2307/2054093 ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 443-456

Author(s):

William H. Nienhauser

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Henry James ◽

Chinese Literature ◽

Structural Approach ◽

Genre Studies ◽

Diachronic Changes ◽

Genre Study

Perhaps the first question should be “Why?” Why transport a critical apparatus heavily laden with paradoxical factions and conflicting terminology back a millennium to the Chinese genre known as cbuana? And why a genre study, when so much groundwork is still necessary before Chinese literature can begin to demand for itself a larger consideration in general contemporary literary criticism? To attend to the second query first, genre studies are essential now for two reasons: 1) because genres evolve much more readily than their designations, and 2) because they are so basic to a reader's (and thus a critic's) approach to a work. Misunderstandings of the diachronic changes of what a generic title may include have led to useless critiques, the most notable case being perhaps that of Henry James and Fielding. In reply to the question of why a structural approach, the answer is less definitive.

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The Literary Criticism of Henry James.

American Literature ◽

10.2307/2925743 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 54 (1) ◽

pp. 145

Author(s):

Clayton L. Eichelberger ◽

Sarah B. Daugherty

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Henry James

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198808787.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Renker

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

Literary Culture ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Literary Realism ◽

Prose Fiction ◽

Literary Movement ◽

The Core ◽

Literary Histories ◽

American Literary Realism

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism’s opposite: a desiccated genteel “twilight of the poets.” The typical tale held that, while poetry sputtered into decline, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain towered over literary culture as “major realists,” with 1885 standing as the ...

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Henry James at the Ethical Turn

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2014.69.3.366 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 69 (3) ◽

pp. 366-393 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Matthew Flaherty

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Recent Work ◽

Henry James ◽

Critical Approaches ◽

Ethical Approaches ◽

Ethical Thinking

Matthew Flaherty, “Henry James at the Ethical Turn: Vivification and Ironization in The Ambassadors” (pp. 366–393) Taking its cue from recent work by Dorothy J. Hale, this paper begins by exploring the extent to which Levinasian, deconstructive, and Aristotelian critical approaches have associated Henry James’s fiction, and the ethical import of reading literature more broadly, with an array of related values including particularity, impulsiveness, and indeterminacy. Seeking to complicate this characterization of the ethical effects of Jamesian fiction, this paper emphasizes the debt of The Ambassadors (1903) to a form of dialectical narration that privileges an array of antithetical values including abstraction, analysis, and understanding. Attending in particular to the novel’s opposition between Lambert Strether’s imagination and Maria Gostrey’s discrimination, I argue that The Ambassadors uses perspectival relations between characters to clarify and challenge the judgments of its characters and, by extension, its readers. By building dialectical oppositions like these into his novels, James does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling so much as he shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought. The paper makes the case that it is through juxtaposition to characters like Maria that the full significance of Strether’s feeling—that is, the perspective of value that motivates his practice—can be grasped by readers seeking to refine their own ethical thinking. By emphasizing how James’s fiction facilitates thoughts that attend to the whole, rather than just provoking feelings that attend to the particular, the paper seeks to expand both received understandings of James’s fiction and of ethical approaches to literary criticism more broadly.

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