Description
Book SynopsisOnce upon a time there were good American novels and bad ones, but none was thought of as a work of art. This title tells the story of how, beginning with Henry James, this began to change. It examines the late-nineteenth century movement to elevate the status of the novel, its sources, paradoxes, and reverberations into the twentieth century.
Trade Review"[This] intriguing book traces James's efforts to promote the Anglo-American novel as not only higher than mere popular entertainment but as a potential claimant for fine art... McGurl's book is highly recommended and a successor to Henry James's The Art of the Novel."--Choice
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: The Rise of the Art-Novel and the Question of Class 1 Certain Novels 1 Mental Labor 10 Methodological Philistinism: From Difference to Distinction 19 One: The Mind's Eye and Mental Labor: Forms of Distinction in the Fiction of Henry James 30 The Novel as Masterpiece 30 Epistemologies of Social Class 42 The Romance of Romance: Virtue Unrewarded 49 Divisive Perspectivism 53 Two: Social Geometries: Taking Place in the Jamesian Modernist Text 57 The Hidden Dimensions of Class 57 Fictions of the Class 66 Extraordinary Readers 74 Three: Downward Mobilities: The Prison of the Womb and the Architecture of Career in Stephen Crane 78 House of Fiction, House of Shame 78 Urban Ambitions: Crane, Wharton, O. Henry 85 Transient Occupations: From Howells to Crane to Dos Passos 102 Four: Highbrows and Du b Blondes: Literary Intellectuals and the Romance of Intelligence 106 Playing Dumb with Anita Loos 106 Bad Students and Smart Sets 111 Morons and Moralizers: The Eugenic Romance 118 Smart White Blacks: Mencken, Stein, and Race 124 Pastoral Intellection 129 Five: Faulkner's Ambit: Modernism, Regionalism, and the Location of Cultural Capital 135 Racinations: A Deeper South 135 Relations: Modernism and Mules 146 Six Making "Literature" of It: Dashiell Ha ett and the Mysteries of High Culture 158 God, Mammon, and Willard Wright 158 Murdering Representation 166 Afterword: Mobius Fictions 177 Notes 183 Index 215
