'THE QUICKENED CONSCIOUSNESS': AESTHETICISM IN HOWELLS AND JAMES

This dissertation studies the response of nineteenth-century American writers to the British "aesthetic movement." Taking as its examples of that response William Dean Howells and Henry James, the dissertation suggests that American writers used their encounter with writers and artists like Pater, Rossetti, Ruskin, Swinburne, and Wilde to clarify their own attitudes towards their art, its moral dimension, and its social role.;"Aestheticism" was not, at least in England, a clear or well-defined body of beliefs or doctrines. Rather it may be best understood as a distinctive angle of vision shared by a number of writers and artists who came to subject received notions about particularly crucial questions--the nature of the self, the experience of time, the possibilities of representation--to sceptical examination, replacing them with a series of incommensurable insights yoked together with considerable force but achieving no satisfactory synthesis. The particular cultural situation and needs of the 19th-century American reading public modified and were modified by the British "aesthetic movement." I then trace the representation of the aesthete in Howells's novels of the 1880s and '90s. Howells attempts to write the realistic fiction for which his criticism argues, but nevertheless finds himself attracted to other forms of representation. The ensuing conflict is reflected in his complex and repeated portraits of aesthetes as morally flawed characters who nevertheless seem uncomfortably similar to the author of his representatives. Like Howells, James is initially troubled by the vociferous advocacy of art associated with the figure of the aesthete, and many of his initial portraits of aesthetes are unsympathetic. But by The Tragic Muse, James is capable of portraying an aesthete, Gabriel Nash, as speaking for his own beliefs about art and society. James' "major phase" fiction deploys the language and insights of British aestheticism as an alternative vocabulary for expressing James's own characteristic insights and assertions. The Golden Bowl may be understood as the great work of aestheticist art that the aesthetic movement itself was unable to produce by reading that novel in the terms of British aestheticism's responses to the problems of selfhood, time, and representation. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).