A Study Of Henry James’s Short Stories On "Literary Life"

Henry James was a famous American novelist and literary critic.His outstanding achievements in both novel writing and literary criticism established his crucial position in the history of English,American and even world literature.As a prolific writer,he published 22 novels,112 short stories,15 plays,7 travelogues,3 autobiographies,as well as a great number of literary reviews and critical essays.Representative works include The Portrait of a Lady,The Wings of the Dove,The Ambassadors,The Golden Bowl,Daisy Miller,The Turn of the Screw,The American Scene,and“The Art of Fiction”.In his novels and stories,James clearly depicts the British and American society in the late19th century.He delicately explores the themes of cultural conflicts and integration between the old and the new world,the influence of the sin of adults on children,and the conflicts between writers’artistic ideals and worldly society.James is regarded as one of the key figures of the 19th-century literary Realism.At the same time,his experiments on limited point of view,the exploration of characters’psychological consciousness and perception,the ambiguity and complexity of language and narration pave the way for the remarkable innovations in fictional technique of the 20^th century Modernism.Contributing significantly to both literary theory and practice,James influences modern writers,such as Joseph Conrad,Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.James also contributes significantly to literary criticism.Reading extensively,James makes excellent reviews on the works of leading European and American writers and critics.At the time,he scatters his literary theory throughout a volume of works,such as critical essays,letters,prefaces and notebooks,forming a complete theoretical system of literary criticism.Additionally,in the 1880s and 1890s,James created a number of short stories that focused on the writer’s“literary life”.During this period,James treated short stories not only as a way of making a living,but also as a medium to carry out literary formal experiment and promote the art of novels.In his short stories on literary life,James explores such major aesthetic issues as the relation between writers and readers,art and society,as well as the author’s position in the process of literary interpretation,and he puts forward his own ideas on literary reading,writing and criticism.These short stories not only reflect the confusion and anxiety of the literati in the mass market at the end of the 19th century,but also are supplements on James’s literary theory,which deserves serious and continuous critical attention.Since the 1980s,scholars have been keen to place James and his works in the social,economic and cultural context,to demystify his image as a“Master”in an ivory tower.These studies promote us to rethink Henry James’s interaction with the mass market.However,the image of James under such studies is so passive and vulgar that it reduces the primacy of his achievements and contributions in novel art.In addition,from the perspective of research objects,scholars who focus on cultural studies mostly examine historical materials and choose canonical long novels as the case study.Scholars who study James’s literary theory limit their materials to non-fictional texts such as reviews,prefaces,notebooks and letters.James’short stories about literary life have been neglected for a long time.In view of this,my dissertation makes a systematic analysis on James’s short stories with the theme of“literary life”,which have not yet aroused much critical attention.By applying the methodology of cultural study and New Historicism,this dissertation investigates the publishing environment of the British and American literature market in the late 19th century,and resituates James’s literary practice and theory into the social,cultural,historical and economic context.This study tries to dialectically analyze the relationship between James’s art and the mass market,as well as James’s efforts and contributions on promoting the legitimization of the art of the fiction and constructing the authority of serious writers.At the same time,through close reading the short stories and non-fictional texts,such as James’s literary reviews,critical essays,notebooks,letters and prefaces,it explores James’s deep thinking on literary criticism,literary reading,literary creation and rhetoric of the fiction,as well as the political appeal behind James’s theory of the art of fictions.The dissertation is composed of four major chapters.The introduction provides a literary review of James studies at home and abroad,defines the research object,and clarifies the methods,the structure and value of this research.The first chapter investigates the publishing history of the British and American literature in the second half of the 19th century,and reveals the anxiety of serious writers including James.In the late 19th century,the remarkable technology progress and social reform paved the way for the expansion and consolidation of the periodical press and its reading public in England and the United States.The commercialization of literary market and the rise of literary professionalism changed the living conditions of writers,challenged the traditional writer-reader relationship,and affected the content and form of literary creation and criticism.The changes in the conditions of literary production,circulation and acceptance promoted the prosperity of novels and reviews,expanded the group of professional writers and enriched their themes of literature.At the same time,they also brought about problems such as commercialization of literary criticism,vulgarization of readers’taste,utilitarianism of writers’creation,and mass production of popular fiction.Therefore,serious writers were facing with the dilemma of art and market,and their literary authority was threatened.They began to reconsider the relationship between author,reader and text,and maintain the status of the novel and construct intellectual authority.Chapter Two focuses on the reader characters in Henry James’s short stories about literary life,in order to illustrate his ideas on literary criticism and reading.In these short stories,James satirizes critics and editors who cater to readers’expectations,biographers who violate writers’privacy,admirers who reify writers as commodity,and social climbers who take advantage of writers’fame.They only pay attention to literary celebrity’s privacy and the symbolic capital of authorship,and no one even reads their works.James also questioned the author-centered mode of literary reading and interpretation,which finds meaning through biographical information and authorial intention.In those short stories,James reveals that this mode of reading and interpretation ruins readers’reading experience and neglects the aesthetic value of the text.James argues that the works of literature instead of authorial information should be the proper object for the acts of reading and interpretation.He emphasizes the close reading and examining language,structure,rhetoric and other artistic skills within the text.Chapter Three discusses the dilemma of art and money,art and life that faced by the writer characters in Henry James’s short stories of literary life.These short stories satirize vulgar writers who seek profits and produce novels according to formula.In these stories,James constructs a literary field that follows the rule of the"loser wins":symbolic capital（not economic capital）and originality（not mechanical production）as the criteria for literary success.Through these short stories,James asks writers to exercise self-discipline,and follow the principles of"disinterestedness"and"originality"in art.In addition,James also discussed the relationship between the artist’s imaginative to actual life,of aesthetic to moral life,and he opposes the supremacy of art over life and the polarity between art and life.James does not emphasize an artistic-self isolated from the society,but“a consciousness of company”between like-minded writers and readers as the solution to the writer’s dilemma between art and life.He is eager to establish a literary community to achieve friendly communication between writers and loyal readers.The fourth chapter analyzes Henry James’s narrative skills and discusses James’s ideas on the relationship between author and text,author and reader in the process of literary creation and literary interpretation.In his short stories on literary life,James chooses"self-effacement".By treating the characters in the story as"the center of consciousness",a"witness"or an anonymous narrator,James cuts off the connection between the author,the narrator and the"implied author",and separates the authorial image in the biographical materials from the text.James creatively uses limited point of view and unreliable narrators in his short stories,which results in irony and ambiguity and leads to the uncertainty of the text,in order to encourage readers to actively participate in intellectual judgment and meaning interpretation of the text.In addition,James’s metaphor of"the death of the author"expresses a rebellion against the authority of the author during the interpretation of the text.It also emphasizes the important role of the author’s creative labor in the text and the cultural authority brought by the high-quality text to the deceased writer.James’s narrative strategy predicts the shift of literary interpretation from author-centered to text-centered and reader-centered in the 20^th century.The conclusion summarizes Henry James’s theory on literary criticism,literary reading and literary creation expressed in his short stories,further points out the ideological motivation behind his theory on the art of fiction,which breaks the traditional image of James.The dissertation finds that Henry James is neither a hermit who escapes into the ideal world of art,nor a utilitarian who succumbs to the vulgar tastes of the reading public,but a romantic reformer.Attracted by the unprecedented opportunities brought by social innovation,he hopes to spread his artistic ideals and principles through short stories,set new standards for literary reading and creation,and construct an ideal group of readers and writers.For James,literature is a social practice,and the art of fiction can cultivate readers’taste in reading and shape the history.In the face of the transitional period of British and American literature market in the end of the 19^th century,Henry James attempts to reassert the status of the art of fiction and maintain intellectual authority of serious writers,by constructing an exclusive and elitist groups of readers and writers in his literary works.