The Novel Art

Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James

Mark McGurl

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691088990, 9780691088983
• eBook ISBN: 9780691214832
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Once upon a time there were good American novels and bad ones, but none was thought of as a work of art. The Novel Art tells the story of how, beginning with Henry James, this began to change. Examining the late-nineteenth century movement to elevate the status of the novel, its sources, paradoxes, and reverberations into the twentieth century, Mark McGurl presents a more coherent and wide-ranging account of the development of American modernist fiction than ever before.


Moving deftly from James to Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, and Djuna Barnes among others, McGurl argues that what unifies this diverse group of ambitious writers is their agonized relation to a middling genre rarely included in discussions of the fine arts. He concludes that the new product, despite its authors' desire to distinguish it from popular forms, never quite forsook the intimacy the genre had long cultivated with the common reader. Indeed, the ''art novel'' sought status within the mass market, and among its prime strategies was a promotion of the mind as a source of value in an economy increasingly dependent on mental labor. McGurl also shows how modernism's obsessive interest in simple-mindedness revealed a continued concern with the masses even as it attempted to use this simplicity to produce a heightened sophistication of form. Masterfully argued and set in elegant prose, The Novel Art provides a rich new understanding of the fascinating road the American novel has taken from being an artless enterprise to an aesthetic one.

index

Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by A. Square, 57–61, 63–64, 66, 75–76, 194n.2, 195n.4

abstract art, 153

Acker, Kathy, 178

Adams, Henry: Democracy, 141; The Education of Henry Adams, 113, 115

Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 191n.17

Altick, Richard, 198n.27

American Mercury, 108–9

Anderson, Margaret. See Little Review

Anderson, Perry, 19, 188n.55

Anderson, Sherwood: Dark Laughter, 109; Double Dealer, 117; Winesburg, Ohio, 130

Anesko, Michael, 36, 184n.9, 190n.12, 197n.24, 198n.31

anthropology, 131, 186n.25, 206–7n.35

Arnold, Edwin, 209n.39

art-novel: aesthetic forms of, 2, 4, 9–10, 29; and class, 2, 4; as cultural capital, 78, 133: definition of, 172, 183n.2; dialectical account of. 9; emergence and rise of, 5–6, 11, 19, 23, 43–44, 129, 182; as pastoral, 8, 13, 19; precursors of, 184n.10; and professionalism, 15; and reading public, 5; tradition of, 130. See also modernist novel

Atherton, Gertrude, 12

Atlantic Monthly, 103

Austen, Jane, 45, 50; Northanger Abby, 50, 94

avant-garde, 7, 59, 76, 93, 153, 181, 183n.2, 213n.9

Baltzell, E. Digby, 188n.52, 205n.27

Balzac, Honoré de, Le Pere Goriot, 194n.3

Barkan, Elazar, 185n.15

Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood, 1, 4–5, 13, 27–29, 175, 179

Barth, John, 178–81; Giles Goat-Boy, or The Revised New Syllabus, 178: Lost in the Funhouse, 177, 179–80

Barthelme, Donald, 178–79

Baym, Nina, 46

Beech, Dave, 189n.58

Behrman, S. N., 116

Bell, Michael Davitt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Rise of the Art-Novel and the Question of Class
• One The Mind’s Eye and Mental Labor: Forms of Distinction in the Fiction of Henry James
• Two Social Geometries: Taking Place in the Jamesian Modernist Text
• Three Downward Mobilities: The Prison of the Womb and the Architecture of Career in Stephen Crane
• Four Highbrows and Dumb Blondes: Literary Intellectuals and the Romance of Intelligence
• Five Faulkner’s Ambit: Modernism, Regionalism, and the Location of Cultural Capital
• Six Making “Literature” of It: Dashiell Hammett and the Mysteries of High Culture
• Afterword Möbius Fictions
• Notes
• Index