Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance leaders proposed that African American artists and intellectuals should uplift their race. In the famous phrase of W.E.B. Du Bois, it was the duty of the “talented tenth” to educate the masses of black Americans while at the same time leading the struggle against white prejudice. This ideology inspired many writers but produced divisive arguments: should African American writing be anchored in authentic popular black culture–whether found in the folkways of the rural South or in the jazz scene of urban communities–or should it represent the deliberately cosmopolitan, educated cultural style of the “New Negroes”? Modernist writers’ interest in the “primitive” accentuated these debates. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance were well aware of how African Americans had been stereotypically demeaned as primitive, uncultured, indeed barely human; given that history, was it possible to celebrate an African American identity authentically rooted in black folk culture?

Langston Hughes was the most popular and versatile of the many writers connected with the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Zora Neale Hurston, and in contrast to Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen (who wanted to work with the patterns of written literary forms, whether traditional or experimental), he wanted to capture the oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form.

Imagism

Ezra Pound first campaigned for “Imagism,” his name for a new kind of poetry. Rather than describing something–an object or situation–and then generalizing about it, Imagist poets attempted to present the object directly, avoiding the ornate diction and complex but predictable verse forms of traditional poetry. Any significance to be derived from the image had to appear inherent in its spare, clean presentation. “Go in fear of abstractions,” Pound wrote. Elaborate grammatical constructions seemed artificial; hence this new poetry tended to work in disconnected fragments. Although imagism lasted only briefly as a formal movement, most subsequent twentieth-century poetry showed its influence. Pound soon moved on to “vorticism” which, although still espousing direct and bare presentation, sought for some principle of dynamism and energy in the image. “A Retrospect” summarizes Pound’s early declarations of the principles of Imagism. His famous list of “Don’ts,” originally published in 1913, cautioned poets against superfluous words, rigid metrical rhythms, and the use of abstract rhetoric rather than “direct treatment” of poetic subjects. Pound’s own poetry by 1918 was taking a turn away from Imagism’s characteristic emphasis on representing “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and toward longer poems, more engaged with history and the inherited materials of art.

New Journalism

Overview

A ‘new journalism’ emerged, and its leading exponent, Tom Wolfe, claimed that it had taken over from the ‘boring’ novel, using its methods–scene-by-scene construction, full recording of dialogue, interiorization of third-person viewpoint, detailed explication of social mores and the hungers expressed in style and status–to record what Wolfe called the ‘crazed obscene uproarious Mannon-faced drug-soaked mau mau lust-oozing Sixties’ (fictional discretion was not something he took over). Though Wolfe and other ‘new journalists’ were inclined to emphasize the stylistic innovation of their methods, their main contribution was to a journalism now ready to confess to authorial subjectivity.

New Journalism in the 1960s-70s pushed the boundaries of traditional journalism and nonfiction writing. The genre combined research with the techniques of fiction writing in the reporting of stories about real-life events. The writers often credited with the beginning of the movement include Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese.

As in traditional investigative reporting, writers in the genre immersed themselves in their subjects, at times spending months in the field gathering facts through research, interviews, and observation. Their finished works were very different, however, from the feature stories typically published in newspapers and magazines of the time. Instead of employing traditional journalistic story structures and an institutional voice, they constructed well-developed characters, sustained dialogue, vivid scenes, and strong plotlines marked with dramatic tension. They also wrote in voices that were distinctly their own. Their writing style, and the time and money that their in-depth research and long stories required, did not fit the needs or budgets of most newspapers (a notable exception was the New York Herald Tribune), although the editors of Equire, The New Yorker, New York, and other prominent magazines sought out those writers and published their work with great commerical success. Many of those writers went on to publish their stories in anthologies or to write what became known as “nonfiction novels,” and many of those works became best sellers.

New Journalism and the Question of Truth

The New Journalists expanded the definition of journalism and of legitimate journalistic reporting and writing techniques. They also associated journalism with fiction when they described their work with phrases such as “nonfiction novel” and “narrative techniques of fiction.” In so doing, they ignited a debate over how much like a novel or short story a journalistic piece could be before it began violating journalism’s commitment to truth and facts. Some observers praised the New Journalists for writing well-crafted, complex, and compelling stories that revitalized readers’ interests in journalism and the topics covered, as well as inspiring other writers to join the profession.

Others, however, worried that the New Journalism was replacing objectivity with a dangerous subjectivity that threatened to undermine the credibility of all journalism. They feared that reporters would be tempted to stray from the facts in order to write more dramatic stories, by, for example, creating composite characters (melding several real people into one fictional character), compressing dialogue, rearrange events, or even fabricating details.

Some New Journalists freely admitted to using those techniques, arguing that they made their stories readable and publishable without sacrificing the essential truthfulness of the tale. Others adamantly opposed the use of those techniques, arguing that any departure from facts, however minor, discredited a story and moved it away from journalism into the realm of fiction.

In engaging in the debate over what counts as truth in journalism, New Journalists were contributing to a wider discussion of the nature of truth and the ability to know and present it objectively in stories, paintings, photographs, and other representational arts. Their works challenged the ideology of objectivity and its related practices that had come to govern the profession. The New Journalists argued that objectivity does not guarantee truth and that so-called “objective” stories can be more misleading than stories told from a clearly presented personal point of view. Mainstream news reporters echoed the New Journalists’ arguments as they began doubting the ability of “objective” journalism to arrive at truth–especially after more traditional reporting failed to convey the complex truth of events such as McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s-1970s, and the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. By 1996, objectivity had been so crippled as a guiding principle that the Society of Professional Journalists dropped it from its ethics code, replacing it with other principles such as fairness and accuracy.

The New Journalists of the 1960s were not the first American journalists to advocate for a more literary approach to writing about contemporary events, nor were they the first to see themselves as representations of a “new journalism.” Some writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Lincoln Steffens, believed that reporters are morally obligated to write stories that are true, well-crafted, and rhetorically persuasive because they can lead readers to empathize with their subjects and can inspire action against social injustice and abuses of power. Steffens and like-minded colleagues–including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and David Graham Phillips–wrote investigative magazine stories in a literary, rhetorically persuasive way. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 derisively called their type of work muckraking. The social and literary ambitions of those first “new journalists” had a lasting impact on journalism, providing a foundation for generations of investigative and literary reporters and editors who believed in factual, socially committed, and lively journalism–including the New Journalists of the 1960s.

Tom Wolfe was one of the most influential promoters of the New Journalism. Wolfe began his career as a newspaperman in 1956 at The Washington Post and later worked for the New York Herald Tribune, where the example of writers such as Jimmy Breslin demonstrated to him that journalism could be creative and exciting. In 1963, when a newspaper strike in New York City left Wolfe temporarily without work, he turned to his editor at Esquire with an idea: he wanted to fly to California to write about a custom car show and the hot-rod culture. The result was Wolfe’s now-famous “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby” (anthologized in his 1964 book by the same name), an energetic piece that became a model of what New Journalism could achieve. In 1973, Wolfe published The New Journalism, in which he explicated the features of the genre. He went on to write several successful books in the style of the New Journalism, including The Right Stuff (1979) and From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), a biting history of modern architecture.

Modernism

Overview

At the heart of the high modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or, at best, arbitrary and fragile human constructions. Order, sequence, and unity in works of art might well express human desires for coherence rather than reliable intuitions of reality. Generalization, abstraction, and high flown writing might conceal rather than convey the real. The form of a story, with its beginnings, complications, and resolutions, might be an artifice imposed on the flux and fragmentation of experience. To the extent that art falsely presented such an order as given or natural, it had to be renovated.

Thus, a key formal characteristic typical of high modernist works, whether in painting, sculpture, or musical composition, is its construction out of fragments–fragments of myth or history, fragments of experience or perception, fragments of previous artistic works. Modernist literature is often notable for what it omits: the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective, and security in earlier literatures. A typical modernist work may seem to begin arbitrarily to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution, consisting of vivid segments juxtaposed without cushioning or integrating transitions. There may be shifts in perspective, voice, and tone. Its rhetoric may be understated, ironic. It may suggest rather than assert, making use of symbols and images instead of statements. Its elements may be drawn from disparate areas of experience. The effect may be shocking and unsettling; the experience of reading will be challenging and difficult. Faced with intuiting connections left unstated, the reader of a modernist work is often said to participate in the creative work of making the poem or story.

Some high modernist works, however, order their discontinuous elements into conspicuous larger patterns, patterns often draw from world literature, mythologies, and religions. For example, Eliot’s The Waste Land layers the Christian narrative of death and resurrection over a broad range of quest myths. The question for readers lies in the meaning of these borrowed structures and mythic parallels: do they reveal profound similarities or iconic contrasts between the modern world and earlier times? For some writers and readers, the adaptability of ancient stories to modern circumstances testified to their deep truth, underlying the surface buzz and confusion of modernity; for others, such parallels indicate Christianity to be only a myth, one of many human constructions aimed at creating order out of, and finding purpose in, history’s flux.

If meaning is a human construction, then meaning cannot be separated from the difficult process of its making; if meaning lies obscured deep underneath the ruins of modern life, then it must be effortfully sought out. Modernist literature therefore tended to foreground the search for meaning over didactic statement, and the subject matter of modernist writing often became, by extension, the poem or literary work itself. While there have long been paintings about painting and poems about poetry, high modernist writing was especially self-reflexive, concerned with its own nature as art and with its questioning of previous traditions of literature. Ironically–because this subject matter was motivated by deep concern about the interrelation of literature and life–this subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist work; high modernism demanded of its ideal readers an encyclopedic knowledge of the traditions it fragmented or ironized. Nevertheless, over time, the principles of modernism became increasingly influential.

Modernist techniques transformed fiction as well as poetry in this period. Prose writers strove for directness, compression, and vividness. They were often sparing of words. The average novel became quite a bit shorter than it had been in the nineteenth century, when a novel was expected to fill two or even three volumes. The modernist aesthetic gave a new significance to the short story, which had previously been thought of as a relatively slight artistic form. (Poems, too, became shorter, as narrative poems lost ground to lyrics and the repetitive patterns of rhyme and meter that had helped sustain long poems in previous centuries lost ground to free verse.) Victorian or realistic fiction achieved its affects by accumulation and saturation; modern fiction preferred suggestion. Victorian fiction often features an authoritative narrator; modern fiction tended to be written in the first person or to limit the reader to one character’s point of view on the action. This limitation accorded with the modernist sense that “truth” does not exist objectively but is the product of the mind’s interaction with reality. The selected point of view is often that of a naïve or marginal person–a child or an outsider–to convey better the reality of confusion and dissent rather than the myth of certainty and consensus.

In both poetry and fiction, modernists tended to emphasize the concrete or sensory image or detail over general statement. Allusions to literary, historical, philosophical, or religious details of the past often keep company, in modernist works, with vignettes of contemporary life, chunks of popular culture, dream imagery, and symbolism drawn from the author’s private repertory of life experiences. A work built from these various materials may move across time and space, shift from the public to the personal, and open literature as a field for every sort of concern. The inclusion of material previously deemed “unliterary” in works of high seriousness extended to language that might previously have been though improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. Traditional realistic fiction had incorporated colloquial and dialect speech, often to comic effect, in its representation of the broad tapestry of social life; but such speakers were usually framed by a narrator’s educated literary voice, conveying truth and authority over subordinate voices.

One essential way to perceive modernism is to see it as an art that insists on its internal frame, on the active presence of the medium used, on the ‘foregrounding’ of the artistic activity, so that the achievement of the story’s form becomes part of the story. This was how Anderson’s work now developed, in an endeavour to render the intuitive, the unspoken, the unconscious as essential realms of experience, manifest both within the story and in the making of the story.

Effects of World War I

Its soil untouched, the United States seemed less directly affected; indeed it emerged from the war an economic beneficiary, now a creditor rather than a debtor nation. It also emerged more deeply convinced of ‘basic’ American values, suspicious of foreign entanglements, uneasy about the direction of world affairs, distrustful of the progressive politics of the pre-war years. Looking to itself, the nation concentrated on business, economic expansion, the advancing principles of individualism, self-advancement, and the pursuit of abundance for all. Yet change was everywhere visible as the economy boomed. Wealth spread, mores altered, the texture of life changed, the new technologies appeared in every home and street; a consciousness of change and generational difference became widespread.

For many of these writers, the war was the subject of their first literary utterances. It was an image of fundamental transition, a challenge to the small-town values among which many of them had grown up, to old heroic ideas of battle, to ideas of ‘culture’ as a body of established values, modes, languages. ‘Culture’ had also meant Europe; but now Europe, tearing itself to pieces on the battlefields, meant to experience not as art and tradition but as horror, extremity, historical exposure. Language itself seemed to shrink, to become inoperative in the face of what was happening, and those who had been to war seemed fundamentally cut off from those who had not–Krebs, in Hemingway’s story ‘A Soldier’s Home’, comes back to his Middle Western background to find old values, meanings, and modes of speech useless to him. In the apocalyptic new history, now begun, men needed new perceptions, new modes of existential self-knowledge, new styles of living and expression to survive.

The war spoke to the oblique, traditional heroic values dislocated. The war spoke to the sense of a bleak modern invitation, a new fissure between old versions of life and present fact. And one answer was a recovery of decadence itself, the attempt to make style transfigure history, give shape to personal life, generate aesthetic substance from contingency.

The decadent sense was, however, prompted not just by the war, but by post-war American development. The compromises of Wilson’s Versailles Treaty, the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify his proposals for a League of Nations, the red scare, the extending of Prohibition through the Volstead Act, the reversion to what the Republican President Harding, Wilson’s successor, called ‘normalcy’–all helped to intensify the feelings of political failure, purposelessness, and cultural emptiness that mark so much of the writing of the Twenties.

In the Thirties novel that looks back on the Twenties, U.S.A., John Dos Passos was to make 1919–the year of expectations–the fulcrum year, and, from the standpoint of the Depression, it was not hard for him to see the Twenties as what it became for many afterwards–the decade of illusions, political ignorance, flaunted capitalism, materialism, isolationism, intolerance. Yet the paradox of the Twenties was that this conservative decade set in motion some of the most profound changes in modern American history–changes less political than behavioural, psychological, and structural, which swept away many of the values Americans thought they were holding fast to. For, as the economy moved its centre from production to consumption, credit ran free and personal spendings boomed, as the middle class expanded and the nation became linked through new technologies in media and transportation, modernity seemed at an accelerated pace. Lifestyles shifted, the generations divided, sexual mores altered. The age of puritanism and Prohibition was also the age of psychoanalysis, jazz, and flappers; the age that challenged innovation and looked nostalgically back to the rural past was also the time of massive new technical and commercial developments–the automobile, the aeroplane, the movie, the radio, the high-rise excitement of the modern city. The mixture of reaction and innovation was exemplified in the key conflicts of the period–the Scopes trial, the Sacco-Vanzetti case. It was also apparent in the arts, which were haunted by images of a simpler rural past even as they responded to and incorporated the new modernity.

But if American fiction of the Twenties was a fiction of experiment, decadence, and dissent, it was not a fiction of total despair. Turning away from naturalism and progressivism towards the avant-garde, the experimental, the bohemian, it expressed a disillusionment and displacement from American life, nowhere more evident than in the mass exodus of American writers to Paris.

Modernism in Paris

Paris offered a cheap bohemia at favourable rates of exchange, but behind the dissent and the desire for the new there often lay a nostalgia for an older and more pastoral America; writing in the experimental alteliers of Paris, many of the expatriates wrote, at a formal distance of a rural, often a Middle Western, American world left behind. Taking instruction from Stein, Pound, and Joyce in the already established tradition of European modernism, they nonetheless infused that modernism with American myths. Drawing on the modernist lore of cultural collapse, adapting the post-realist conventions of the dissipation of chronology and linear narrative, of discontinuity between history and form, they groped towards a new mythology that expressed not just the discontinuities and defeats but also the excitements of energetic modernity of contemporary America. As Gertrude Stein had said, modernism seemed peculiarly American, a natural expression of the new ‘space-time continuum’ that was a fact of American life. The techniques of modernist style–spatial form, rapid cutting, the need for newer and harder modes of expression, mechanization or abstraction of the human figure, a sense of historicism dislocation, psychic lesion, the void anonymity of nature and landscape–seemed to offer a discourse appropriate to American experience. It expressed the tempo of change, the sense of movement, the evanescence and dislocation of city life, but perhaps especially the feeling that America was itself the centre of modernity.

The adaptation of modernism in the American fiction of the Twenties newly linked that fiction with much of the most important experimental work now happening in Europe; but it was also a way of responding to the forces of change at work in American experience. Modernism was, in a sense, reportorial, a new style of art responding to new styles of life. One part of its aim was to capture new consciousness and new structures in literature.

But another was no so much to depict the collapse of order and structure as to attempt to recover it through the discontinuous construct, which could explore the parts of a culture in the attempt to discover a new coherent form. Thus an important endeavor running through the American modernism of the 1920s is the attempt to overcome the sense of historical fracture and Spenglerian cultural despair through a spatial modern epic, a new version of the Great American novel.

The 1920s American Novel

The American novel of the Twenties is extremely attentive to the feel of the modern, and to its unease. It is haunted by apocalyptic anxieties, troubled with a deep cultural unease, and displays a decadent dismay in the face of the material world and the political order. It nonetheless hungers to make the world re-cohere, either by reaching behind the present to a recovered pastoral world, or to some timeless moment set beyond the contingency of modern time, or by attempting to make form itself an expression of culture as possibility. Underlying the decade was, in fact, an excitement in experiment which gave to American fiction a whole new impulse. Major new forms and talents appeared; Malcolm Cowley rightly calls this time a ‘second flowering’, to be compared with the first great American flowering in the 1840s and 1850s, the age of Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman. The writers who now appeared gave the American novel a new version of the modern and a new version of modernism.

Naturalism

Social Darwinism–humans are not capable of shaping their own destinies and can only respond to the things that happen to them.

Poor, immigrant, social outcasts needed something more extreme than a mere “realistic” treatment, to be more sensitive and attend to their lack of power. Characters are dehumanized, determined, moved by inner and outer forces beyond conscious moral control (Bell). “Dirty.”

Bell calls naturalism an actual literary genre with characteristics:

• Lower class life
• The play of brute forces
• <Brutal struggles of business and the underclass>
• Futility of the human endeavor
• Narrative arrangement (middle class or third person omniscient narrator views brutal characters)

Social Darwinism likened the climb of the social ladder and accumulation of wealth to Darwin’s theory of evolution–“survival of the fittest” (first coined by Herbert Spencer in 1884).

More characteristics:

• Characters: Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader.
• Setting: Frequently an urban setting

Themes

1. Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes
2. The “brute within” each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions; passions such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often “man against nature” or “man against himself” as characters struggle to retain a “veneer of civilization” despite external pressures that threaten to release the “brute within”
3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings
4. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect–and afflict–individual lives
5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion

Emile Zola’s Influence on American Naturalism

In American, these ferments are the most visible in the work of the remarkable new generation of writers who began to emerge in the 1890s and took on strong character as a generation–partly because they shared aesthetic theories and preoccupations, partly because they shared the tutelage of Howells, partly because most had brief careers and early deaths. Often presented by the critics as strongly American, working as Alfred Kazin put it, ‘on native grounds’, they were in fact much influenced by European theories of naturalism–above all those of Emile Zola, who had in 1879 set down his theory of the naturalist novel in Le Roman experimental.

For Zola, the word ‘experimental’ had scientific analogies: the novelist’s task was to undertake a social or scientific study, recording facts, styles and systems of behaviour, living conditions, the workings of institutions, and deducing the underlying processes of environmental, genetic, and historical-evolutionary development. Naturalism was thus realism scientized, systematized, taken finally beyond realist principles of fidelity to common experience or of humanistic exploring of individual lives within the social and moral web of existence.

Indeed the analogy with painting drew the American naturalist novelists back towards the problems of form and subjectivity which also haunted the 1890s; the tense relation between art and life, impressionism and naturalism, became a dominant theme in the writing and criticism of the most impressive writers of the decade.

For these writers, confronting a new American social experience, naturalism offered a view which questions the conviction that man was a conscious and rational creature, that happiness is secured by virtuous behavior, that the landscape of familiar experience offered all the moral pointers men needed. With this view, they could observe mass and mechanism, touch on unexplored areas of society, the life of working people, the problem of cities, the operations of social and genetic patterns. Their writing drew on the new ‘brute fact’ of American life; hence their insistence that literature derived from life rather than form. They turned to consciously modern settings–the shock city, the West, the ghettos, depressed homesteads, the skyscrapers, corporations and department stores–and period themes–the split between culture and materiality, idealism, and underlying economic and sexual drives.

Realism

Major authors: William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton

Rejection of romantic, heroic, exaggerated idealistic views of life. Favors detailed & accurate descriptions of the everyday. Characters are ordinary people with normal moral dilemmas. A focus on polite society and the middle class. Acknowledges beauty whereas naturalism does not (Howells). Overall a vague set of intentions and attitudes, cannot be defined clearly except by individual author practices (Bell).

Characteristics (from Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition):

• Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot
• Character is more important than action or plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject
• Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past
• Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class
• Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances
• Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, matter-of-fact
• Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses
• Interior or psychological realism a variant form

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Henry James’s Realism

James was one of the most cosmopolitan of the realists, and had moved to realism’s fountainhead in Europe. Earlier, James’s expatriation had seemed to Howells an evasion of realism’s task, an escape to Europe’s ‘romance’. In fact James’s choice of milieu arose from his need for a dense social order that would set art into motion; and his ‘romance’ was managed through a realist perception refined by contact with Flaubert, Turgenev, and George Eliot. His classic requirement became ‘solidity of specification’, meaning not a repertorial but a registrative view of art. Art’s task was not to record but to make life; reality was a constructed, not a recorded, thing; it was in the inherent tension of the novel between empiricism and idealism, realism and romance, naturalism’s ‘magnificent treadmill of the pigeon-holed and documented’ and romance’s ‘balloon of experience’, that the form found itself. This was James’s quest of the 1870s and 1880s; but by the beginning of the 1890s, he too was beginning to feel under pressure, and he replied to Howells’s pessimism with his own. ‘I have felt, for a long time past,’ he wrote in 1895, ‘that I have fallen on evil days–every sign or symbol of being in the least wanted, anywhere by anyone, having so utterly failed.’ Again, his crisis was partly personal, but it was also philosophical and aesthetic; however, for all his doubts, James responded to the aesthetic transformations of the 1890s, and made an extraordinary and innovative recovery. By the time of this letter he was already on a new path that would lead, with The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew in 1897, to the remarkable work of his late phase–work in which consciousness seers itself from the world’s materiality, changing the entire grammar of fiction. By the century’s turn, James was ready, in his essay ‘The Future of Fiction’, to suggest that the novel might reach a new level of self-realization: ‘It has arrived, in truth, the novel, late at self-consciousness, but it has done its utmost ever since to make up for lost opportunities,’ he noted, pointing undoubtedly, to the new achievements that had grown in Europe and America during the nineteenth century’s last decade.