The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James

Mark McGurl

Princeton University Press, Nov 4, 2001 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 221 pages

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.

Contents

• The Rise of the ArtNovel and the Question of Class: 1
• Mental Labor: 10
• From Difference to Distinction: 19
• The Minds Eye and Mental Labor Forms of Distinction in the Fiction of Henry James: 30
• Epistemologies of Social Class: 42
• Virtue Unrewarded: 49
• Divisive Perspectivism: 53
• Social Geometries Taking Place in the Jamesian Modernist Text: 57
• Fictions of the Mass: 66
• Extraordinary Readers: 74
• Downward Mobilities The Prison of the Womb and the Architecture of Career in Stephen Crane: 78
• Crane Wharton O Henry: 85
• From Howells to Crane to Dos Passos: 102
• Highbrows and Dumb Blondes Literary Intellectuals and the Romance of Intelligence: 106
• Bad Students and Smart Sets: 111
• The Eugenic Romance: 118
• Mencken Stein and Race: 124
• Pastoral Intellection: 129
• Faulkners Ambit Modernism Regionalism and the Location of Cultural Capital: 135
• Modernism and Mules: 146
• Making Literature of It Dashiell Hammett and the Mysteries of High Culture: 158
• Murdering Representation: 166
• Möbius Fictions: 177
• Notes: 183
• Index: 215

About the author

Mark McGurl is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James; Princeton paperbacks; The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James, Mark McGurl
• Author: Mark McGurl
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2001
• ISBN: 0691088993, 9780691088990
• Length: 221 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Writing / Fiction Writing; Literary Criticism / American / General; Literary Criticism / General; Social Science / Regional Studies