Download E-books The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells PDF

By Rob Davidson

Henry James (1843–1916) and William Dean Howells (1837–1920) are top identified for the imperative roles they performed as nineteenth-century American novelists, penning such classics as James’s Portrait of a Lady and Howells’s The upward thrust of Silas Lapham. Their significance as literary critics, besides the fact that, has been underplayed for many years. even if convinced points of James’s and Howells’s feedback were rigorously considered—James’s “Prefaces” and Howells’s Criticism and Fiction, for example—no student has formerly undertaken a accomplished comparative research in their respective serious oeuvres. In The grasp and the Dean, Rob Davidson offers the 1st book-length research of James’s literary feedback to be released because the early Eighties and the first-ever book-length research of Howells’s feedback. contemplating Howells’s usually accredited place between students because the such a lot influential American literary critic of the interval, the sort of examine is lengthy overdue.

starting with a close exam of the ecu and household resources that led James and Howells towards realism, Davidson examines the interrelationships among the 2 writers, with distinctive emphasis on their diverging aesthetic issues and attitudes towards the industry and viewers, their ideals about the ethical worth of fiction and the U.S. as a literary topic, and their quite a few writings approximately one another. A rigorous, intertextual analyzing in their paintings as critics unearths either deeper rifts and extra intimate similarities among the 2 writers than were well-known formerly. Of precise notice is Davidson’s cautious awareness to the often ignored ultimate twenty years of Howells’s career.

This shut examine the lesser-known serious paintings of James and Howells will charm either to students of the interval and to someone looking a great advent to a crucially vital period of yank literary criticism.

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