The master and the dean: The literary criticism and aesthetics of Henry James and William Dean Howells, 1859--1897

While certain aspects of Henry James's and William Dean Howells's literary criticism have been carefully considered---James's "Prefaces" and Howells's Criticism and Fiction, for instance---no scholar has hitherto undertaken a comprehensive comparative study of their respective critical oeuvres. The present study analyzes the first two-thirds of each writer's career as a literary critic. Beginning with a thorough examination of the European and domestic sources that led James and Howells toward realism, I examine the developments and inter-relationships between the two writers, with special emphasis on their diverging aesthetic concerns and attitudes toward the market and audience; their attitudes concerning the moral value of fiction and the United States as a literary subject; and their various writings concerning each other. A rigorous, intertextual reading of their work as critics reveals both deeper rifts and more intimate similarities between the two writers than has been recognized by scholars.