| Henry James came to see, near the end of his career, the integral part that publishing serially played in the development of his craft. The story he tells in the prefaces to the New York Edition (1907-09) about the genesis and composition of his oeuvre returns repeatedly, if guardedly, to the salutary challenge of writing for the magazines. "I had been open from far back to any pleasant provocation for ingenuity," recalls James in the preface to The Ambassadors (1903, North American Review), "that might reside in one's actively adopting---so as to make it, in its way, a small compositional law---recurrent breaks and resumptions." He had decided at this late point in his career "regularly to exploit these often rather rude jolts---having found, as I believed, an admirable way to it." "The Serial Art of Henry James" records this transformative process. It endeavors to trace explicitly what James, on the one of what I call the author's "serial aesthetic," his exploitation and modification of serial conventions in the pursuit of the art of fiction.;The term "serial aesthetic" registers the coiling of three lines of inquiry. First, it formulates the provisionality of James's narrative theory, a narrative theory of provisionality underwritten by the author's adaptations of serial form. Secondly, it challenges the stadial descriptions of James's career arc first formulated by the New Critics and accepted as axiomatic by contemporary scholars. Far from insisting that James developed the serial aesthetic along predictable or consistent lines, this dissertation maintains that the author never ceased reshaping the art novel and its concepts. Lastly, it calls attention to the fact that this hyperactively creative writer is a "serial" author in both the material and behavioral senses of the word: James may have been a serial repeater of characters, themes, and techniques, but he was also a "compulsive reviser," never content with his "last word about anything.";Stressing the term "serial" in these ways frees it from its unnecessarily narrow bibliographical context. It opens a conceptual space from which to highlight both the aesthetic consequences of James's career as a serial author and literary modernism's debt to mass cultural forms such as the magazine novel. My dissertation accordingly opens with a chapter on Roderick Hudson (1875, Atlantic Monthly ), which tells the story of a young artist, much like James, struggling to reconcile his aesthetic ideals with the demands of an increasingly entrenched culture of commercialism. Roderick Hudson responds to this challenge by mimicking and appropriating the formalities of serialization. My second chapter focuses on an expansive work from James's middle career, The Tragic Muse (Atlantic Monthly, 1889-90). Dramatizing the friction between aesthetic autonomy and social engagement, this critically neglected "baggy monster" embodies in its outsize, asymmetric proportions James's own seeming rejection of the material and commercial conditions of serial production.;The innovations in serial form that resulted from James's experiments in The Tragic Muse set the tone for the author's celebrated late style. His 1903 masterpiece, The Ambassadors, is consequently the subject of my third chapter. Serialized in the highbrow monthly North American Review, this novel carefully modifies conventions of magazine serialization, such as deferral and suspense, to suit a deeply regulated structure of delay and ambiguity that critics continue to identify as quintessentially Jamesian. My final chapter addresses a late non-fiction work, The American Scene (1907), which imagines American self and American space as "serial" in two senses. On the one hand, they are perceived as "perpetually provisional," both populace and polis undergoing continual and unpredictable change. On the other hand, this critically celebrated work also anticipated what Jean Paul Sartre, Iris Marion Young, and Benedict Anderson later understood as the "serial" construction of private and public selfhood. Such seriality involves an ongoing dialectical process of identification between self and other that for James defines "American" subjectivity. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the degree to which James's work as a serial novelist is inextricable from the conceptual and material development of his celebrated techniques. |
