The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James

by Mark McGurl

Overview

Once upon a time there were good American novels and bad ones, but none was thought of as a work of art. The Novel Art tells the story of how, beginning with Henry James, this began to change. Examining the late-nineteenth century movement to elevate the status of the novel, its sources, paradoxes, and reverberations into the twentieth century, Mark McGurl presents a more coherent and wide-ranging account of the development of American modernist fiction than ever before.


Moving deftly from James to Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, and Djuna Barnes among others, McGurl argues that what unifies this diverse group of ambitious writers is their agonized relation to a middling genre rarely included in discussions of the fine arts. He concludes that the new product, despite its authors' desire to distinguish it from popular forms, never quite forsook the intimacy the genre had long cultivated with the common reader. Indeed, the ''art novel'' sought status within the mass market, and among its prime strategies was a promotion of the mind as a source of value in an economy increasingly dependent on mental labor. McGurl also shows how modernism's obsessive interest in simple-mindedness revealed a continued concern with the masses even as it attempted to use this simplicity to produce a heightened sophistication of form. Masterfully argued and set in elegant prose, The Novel Art provides a rich new understanding of the fascinating road the American novel has taken from being an artless enterprise to an aesthetic one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691214832
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Mark McGurl is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: The Rise of the Art-Novel and the Question of Class	1
	Certain Novels	1
	Mental Labor	10
	Methodological Philistinism: From Difference to Distinction	19
1	The Mind's Eye and Mental Labor: Forms of Distinction in the Fiction of Henry James	30
	The Novel as Masterpiece	30
	Epistemologies of Social Class	42
	The Romance of Romance: Virtue Unrewarded	49
	Divisive Perspectivism	53
2	Social Geometries: Taking Place in the Jamesian Modernist Text	57
	The Hidden Dimensions of Class	57
	Fictions of the Mass	66
	Extraordinary Readers	74
3	Downward Mobilities: The Prison of the Womb and the Architecture of Career in Stephen Crane	78
	House of Fiction, House of Shame	78
	Urban Ambitions: Crane, Wharton, O. Henry	85
	Transient Occupations: From Howells to Crane to Dos Passos	102
4	Highbrows and Dumb Blondes: Literary Intellectuals and the Romance of Intelligence	106
	Playing Dumb with Anita Loos	106
	Bad Students and Smart Sets	111
	Morons and Moralizers: The Eugenic Romance	118
	Smart White Blacks: Mencken, Stein, and Race	124
	Pastoral Intellection	129
5	Faulkner's Ambit: Modernism, Regionalism, and the Location of Cultural Capital	135
	Racinations: A Deeper South	135
	Relations: Modernism and Mules	146
6	Making "Literature" of It: Dashiell Hammett and the Mysteries of High Culture	158
	God, Mammon, and Willard Wright	158
	Murdering Representation	166
	Afterword: Mobius Fictions	177
	Notes	183
	Index	215

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The Novel Art may be a 'first book' in a technical sense, but it is much more than that. In ambition, range, subtlety and sophistication, it is fully mature and accomplished, easily the match of anything currently being produced in the various fields into which it enters. Ranging through and across period, genre, and critical lines, Mark McGurl makes a compelling set of arguments with wit and panache. His book exemplifies what it anatomizes—it gives us the intellectual thrill of watching a playful intelligence take up something we thought we knew, and show us things we had never seen there before. It is very important indeed."—Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Jonathan Freedman

The Novel Art may be a 'first book' in a technical sense, but it is much more than that. In ambition, range, subtlety and sophistication, it is fully mature and accomplished, easily the match of anything currently being produced in the various fields into which it enters. Ranging through and across period, genre, and critical lines, Mark McGurl makes a compelling set of arguments with wit and panache. His book exemplifies what it anatomizes—it gives us the intellectual thrill of watching a playful intelligence take up something we thought we knew, and show us things we had never seen there before. It is very important indeed.
— Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Introduction

Once, Not Long Ago 3
CHAPTER ONE: Fairy Tales about Fairy Tales: Notes on Canon Formation 19
CHAPTER TWO: Voices in Print: Oralities in the Fairy Tale 46
CHAPTER THREE: The Invention of the Fairy Tale in Britain 73
INTERLUDE: Once Again 99
CHAPTER FOUR: New Frames for Old Tales 104
CHAPTER FIVE: The Art of Transliteration 135
CONCLUSION: Twice-Told Tales 160
NOTES 165
BIBLIOGRAPHY 193
INDEX 211

Editorial Reviews

"[This] intriguing book traces James's efforts to promote the Anglo-American novel as not only higher than mere popular entertainment but as a potential claimant for fine art. . . . McGurl's book is highly recommended and a successor to Henry James's The Art of the Novel."

Choice

"The Novel Art may be a 'first book' in a technical sense, but it is much more than that. In ambition, range, subtlety and sophistication, it is fully mature and accomplished, easily the match of anything currently being produced in the various fields into which it enters. Ranging through and across period, genre, and critical lines, Mark McGurl makes a compelling set of arguments with wit and panache. His book exemplifies what it anatomizes—it gives us the intellectual thrill of watching a playful intelligence take up something we thought we knew, and show us things we had never seen there before. It is very important indeed."—Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

From the Publisher