From Practice to Theory: Henry James’s Prefaces
Abstract
Henry James’s prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels provide fascinating insights into how his novelistic practice and theory meshed together. Although James was not the first to promote the novel as a serious and worthy art earlier authors such as Jane Austen and Edward Bulwer Lytton had anticipated James’s views in their writings , he deliberately and systematically devoted a considerable part of his critical output to this end. Among these writings, his early essay “The Art of Fiction” stands out, not least because it expounds a conception of the novel which remained essentially unchanged to the end of his career. In the essay, James argues that the main objective of the novelistic art, “a personal, a direct impression of life,” can only be realized fully through painstaking attention to form. In the prefaces, James gives detailed accounts of how he experimented with form, particularly with point of view, in pursuit of this objective. Through a discussion of several of the prefaces, this article traces how James’s theories of fiction found their counterparts in what he terms the “execution” of his novels. The article concludes with a comparison of the opening paragraphs of The Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton: published sixteen years apart, the two novels exemplify the Master’s neverending quest for achieving the form best suited to the matter at hand
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References
- Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. London: Collins, 1953. Print.
- Brooks, Cleanth, R.W.B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren. “Henry James (1843-1916).” American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Ed. Brooks, Lewis, and Warren. Book C. New York: St. Martin’s, 1973. Print.
- Bulwer Lytton, Edward. “On Art in Fiction.” The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. Vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1841. 52- 88. Google Book Search. Web. 28 Sep. 2014.
- ---. The Last of the Barons. London, 1859. Google Book Search. Web. 28 Sep. 2014.
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- ---. The Portrait of a Lady. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Print.
- ---. The Spoils of Poynton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Print.
- Stang, Richard. The Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870. New York: Columbia UP; London: Routledge, 1959. Print.