From advertisements to golden bowls: Henry James's late fiction, the new middle class and cosmopolitan modernism.

摘要

Scholars have long noted Henry James's partiality to conventional money and marriage plots, yet they have generally exempted the author himself from being identified with a style influenced by business. My dissertation project goes beyond this acceptance of James's representations of money and markets as general reflections of his publishing anxieties to reveal a writer with a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of capitalism than has been previously acknowledged. I argue novels such as The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), along with less well-known tales, essays and plays he wrote during and after the 1890s, demonstrate that James distinguishes between an older stage of British capitalism and an emerging American brand of corporate capitalism. Marxist critics have ignored James's writings in their focus on economic and class issues because James does not directly address material production in his novels. But the early twentieth century witnessed a shift from industries predominated by manual laborers who produced tangible commodities to a "new middle class" of mental laborers who produced intangible products or services such as the manufacture of cultural commodities.;This dissertation asserts that it is precisely the rise of these corporate white-collar workers and their impact on literature and aesthetics, in particular the way their mental labor altered the forms and symbolic logic of mass culture, that James focused on in his late fiction. I trace James's responses in his own writing to these changes and portray a writer who participates in, rather than resists, these economic developments. The stylistic innovations cosmopolitan modernists later adopted from James were a competitive response to changes in contemporary American economic systems. Thus James's stylistic representations of mental labor affect the relations between American "Realism" ("Naturalism") and cosmopolitan "Modernism." By repositioning James's late fiction at the intersection of these supposedly polarized literary movements, I examine the ways they were less opposed in their principles than scholars often assume.