Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:43:27.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×