| James is the first to establish the system of novel theory in Western countries. His remarks on thenovel is scattered in his literary criticism papers, the prefaces of the New York edition, letters and literarynotes. His system of novel theory includes theories on writing, style and narrative technique.James cares much about theory of writing. He believes that fiction should first be of reality. He notonly inherits the tradition of realism, but also walks into psychological realism. In addition, Jamesalways regards the novel as an organism and stresses that the novel must follow the principle of organicunity, which mainly includes the unity of central consciousness, scene system and form and content.Narrative theory is the core of James'novel theory. He abandoned the omniscient story teller, andtold the story in the view of a perspective character in the novel, namely, the central consciousness. Butin many cases, the over-reliance on one perspective would mislead readers. Therefore, James putsforward the"lamps theory"—a group of people rotating around a central object, from whoseperspectives to illuminate the many sides of the object; these people are called"lamps".James also is a well-known stylist. In his later works, in order to appropriately reflect the characters'thoughts and feelings, he creates a kind of"late James style"with subtle language and obscure meaning.In lexical level, he tends to use abstract nouns as the subject, nominalize the words that describe mentalawareness, and use functional words extensively. In syntactic level, he mainly uses the periodic sentence,sentence segmentation and rhetoric and figures of speech.This thesis attempts to make clear the structure of Henry James'novel theories and tries to discusshow they guide Henry James'writing, in other words, how Henry James'novels present his noveltheories. His novels are the best embodiment of his literary theories. We would have a betterunderstanding of them through reading into his novels.
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