Book contents
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- Introduction: realism, protest, accommodation
- 17 Realism and radicalism: the school of Howells
- 18 James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal
- 19 Theories of the American novel in the age of realism
- 20 The novel in postbellum print culture
- 21 Twain, class, and the Gilded Age
- 22 Dreiser and the city
- 23 Novels of civic protest
- 24 Novels of American business, industry, and consumerism
- 25 New Americans and the immigrant novel
- 26 Cather and the regional imagination
- 27 Wharton, marriage, and the New Woman
- 28 The postbellum race novel
- 29 The African American novel after Reconstruction
- 30 The rise of naturalism
- 31 Imagining the frontier
- 32 Imperialism, Orientalism, and empire
- 33 The hemispheric novel in the post-revolutionary era
- 34 The woman's novel beyond sentimentalism
- 35 Dime novels and the rise of mass-market genres
- 36 Readers and reading groups
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
18 - James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal
from PART TWO - REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- General Introduction
- PART ONE INVENTING THE AMERICAN NOVEL
- PART TWO REALISM, PROTEST, ACCOMMODATION
- Introduction: realism, protest, accommodation
- 17 Realism and radicalism: the school of Howells
- 18 James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal
- 19 Theories of the American novel in the age of realism
- 20 The novel in postbellum print culture
- 21 Twain, class, and the Gilded Age
- 22 Dreiser and the city
- 23 Novels of civic protest
- 24 Novels of American business, industry, and consumerism
- 25 New Americans and the immigrant novel
- 26 Cather and the regional imagination
- 27 Wharton, marriage, and the New Woman
- 28 The postbellum race novel
- 29 The African American novel after Reconstruction
- 30 The rise of naturalism
- 31 Imagining the frontier
- 32 Imperialism, Orientalism, and empire
- 33 The hemispheric novel in the post-revolutionary era
- 34 The woman's novel beyond sentimentalism
- 35 Dime novels and the rise of mass-market genres
- 36 Readers and reading groups
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND BEYOND
- PART FOUR CONTEMPORARY FORMATIONS
- A selected bibliography
- Index
Summary
Albert Einstein once said that the most important question facing humanity is whether the universe is a friendly place. For William and Henry James, the universe is decidedly unfriendly, especially in terms of satisfying the dreams and desires that individuals imaginatively create but are unable to realize. This gulf between desire and actuality constitutes the defining tension of both Jamesian pragmatism and Jamesian realism, a tension that is best described by William James in Pragmatism (1907): “Is all ‘yes, yes’ in the universe? Doesn't the fact of ‘no’ stand at the very core of life?” At their most fundamental level, pragmatism and realism are ways to explore the psychological, social and philosophical consequences of a world that says “no.”
In 1896, Henry James wrote to his friend A. C. Benson, “I have the imagination of disaster and see life as indeed ferocious and sinister.” This baleful perspective when translated into James's fictional world has a tragic and at times a comic dimension, leading to a situation in which the protagonists are robbed of precisely what they desire, namely a profound intimacy with another. Whether it is Christopher Newman's romantic rebuff in The American (1877), or Isabel Archer's miserable marriage in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), or Milly Theale's terminal illness in The Wings of the Dove (1902), James repeatedly constructs a fictional world that withholds intimacy from its major characters. When William Dean Howells chides James for not ending The American with the marriage of Christopher Newman and his French fiancée Claire de Cintré, James admits that such an ending would have been “prettier,” but Newman and de Cintré, he insists, represent an “impossible couple.”
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of the American Novel , pp. 304 - 321Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011