Henry James as Critic: From the Pictorial to the Formal

Abstract

Abstract

James often compared fiction to visual art and to drama, revealing his ideal of formal unity combined with the illusion of life.  Compared to his fellow realists, such as Howells, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola and Galsworthy, he is found to be unique among them but tending towards the values of formal composition he found in Flaubert.  This study examines James’s own evaluations of these other novelists and the paradoxes of the esthetics in his critical essays, in which awareness of process the is seen to be the main source of reading pleasure, and the story of the story’s composition is viewed as “more objective” than the story of the protagonist.  The essay surveys James’s criticism originally published from the 1860s to 1912