The arts and artists in the fiction of Henry James, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather

My dissertation seeks to demonstrate at least one important way in which three major American novelists at the turn from the nineteenth century into the twentieth---Henry James, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather---impacted critical and literary thought through their theories and fiction. They adhered to the premise that the sister arts furnished a critical language and rubric by which to assess various elements of culture, including fiction. All three authors borrowed images, metaphors, and patterns from the plastic arts---painting, sculpture, music, the dramatic arts, architecture---which allowed them to fill a critical vacuum by supplying them with the vocabulary to describe, qualify, assess, and render visible basic elements of their own craft.; I make use of biographies, letters, critical essays, and secondary sources to bolster my argument, and rely on major works of fiction, as well as short fiction to supply further evidence for my claims. The dissertation is organized by author. The first (introductory) chapter provides a social, cultural, and to some extent, historical overview of these authors' lives and the era in which they wrote. The subject of the second chapter is James's The Tragic Muse, the third chapter, Wharton's The Reef and The Custom of the Country, and the fourth chapter, Cather's The Professor's House. These chapters demonstrate how the authors' beliefs about various art forms (portraiture, architecture and music for instance), both shape and are reflected back in patterns, stylistic choices, and the very language of their fiction. The final concluding chapter demonstrates how all three offered a bridge from traditional to modern ways of regarding fiction as an art in its own right.