ABOUT THIS BOOK

Henry James (1843–1916) and William Dean Howells (1837–1920) are best known for the central roles they played as nineteenth-century American novelists, penning such classics as James’s Portrait of a Lady and Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham. Their importance as literary critics, however, has been underplayed for decades. Although certain aspects of James’s and Howells’s criticism have been carefully considered—James’s “Prefaces” and Howells’s Criticism and Fiction, for example—no scholar has previously undertaken a comprehensive comparative study of their respective critical oeuvres. In The Master and the Dean, Rob Davidson presents the first book-length study of James’s literary criticism to be published since the early 1980s and the first-ever book-length study of Howells’s criticism. Considering Howells’s commonly accepted position among scholars as the most influential American literary critic of the period, such a study is long overdue.

Beginning with a detailed examination of the European and domestic sources that led James and Howells toward realism, Davidson examines the interrelationships between the two writers, with special emphasis on their diverging aesthetic concerns and attitudes toward the market and audience, their beliefs concerning the moral value of fiction and the United States as a literary subject, and their various writings about each other. A rigorous, intertextual reading of their work as critics reveals both deeper rifts and more intimate similarities between the two writers than have been recognized previously. Of special note is Davidson’s careful attention to the frequently overlooked final two decades of Howells’s career.

This close look at the lesser-known critical work of James and Howells will appeal both to scholars of the period and to anyone seeking an exceptional introduction to a crucially important era of American literary criticism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rob Davidson is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Chico. He is the author of Field Observations: Stories (University of Missouri Press).

REVIEWS

“Consistently intelligent, thoroughly researched, gracefully written. . . . This is an excellent study, probably the definitive study of the criticism of James and Howells.”—John W. Crowley

TABLE OF CONTENTS






Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction
The Undiscovered Country 1
I. The Literary Criticism of Henry James and
William Dean Howells, 1859-1884
1. A Horror of Dogma
James, Howells, and the Roots of American Realism 11
2. Young Americans
Criticism and Correspondence I 35
3. James's "The Art of Fiction" in Critical Context 49
II. The Literary Criticism of Henry James and
William Dean Howells, 1885-1897
4. Defining the Critic in the "Editor's Study" and
"The Science of Criticism" 73
5. "The Honest Daylight about Us"
Social, Ethical, and Moral Concerns in the Criticism
of Howells and James, 1886-1895 98
6. "American Chances and Opportunities"
Criticism and Correspondence II 129




III.The Literary Criticism of Henry James and
William Dean Howells, 1898-1920
7. The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
Defining the Writer, the Novel, and the Critic
in the Twentieth Century 161
8. James's Prefaces to the New York Edition 193
9. Howells's Literary Criticism in the "Editor's
Easy Chair" and Heroines of Fiction 224
10. On Native Grounds
Criticism and Correspondence III 256
Bibliography 283
Index 291