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8 - Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary: Henry James and The Bostonians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Jonathan Freedman
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Summary

In his 1907 preface to The American, on the subject of editing his own voluminous oeuvre for the New York Edition of his work, a meditative Henry James wrote that “it is as difficult... to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and south.” The question of James's commitment to literary realism dogged him throughout his career, and it would continue to be linked (as his image suggests) with the problem of his commitment to national traditions and cultures. Some readers have argued that the whole body of James's work is marked by traces of the realist project; others argue that only specific texts stake their claims under the sign of realism, understood as an interest in contemporaneity and its psychic and social effects. The only point of consensus on this issue, it seems, concerns James's fiction of the mid-1880s, particularly The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians. Taken together, these novels are said to instance the power and limits of James's experiments with realism, marking an “episode” in his evolving authorial practice.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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