Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation Hardback - 1996

Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation describes a new Henry James - a writer who, rather than fashioning himself as an iconic figure of high culture, tests his commitments in contest with emerging popular forms. Countering trends in critical studies that have privileged the popular as a unique site of both cultural resistance and identity formation, Sara Blair argues for the importance of literary institutions to those processes in the years spanned by James's career. Beginning with an analysis of the links between racial theory in the 1870s, popular travel narrative, and James's early travel essays and reviews, Blair considers the complexities of his positionings within and against genteel, "Anglo-Saxon", American, and other cultural frames. These gestures become central to James's literary performance, she argues, in his experiments with American realism, as he redirects its nation-building designs. Through detailed analyses of The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, and The American Scene, Blair evidences James's growing interest in the newly definitive mass forms - including the popular press, photography, and visual culture - through which racial and national identities are being forged. Her book makes a powerful case for reading James and the high culture he shapes with a sense of sustained contradiction, even as she argues for the historical and ongoing importance of literary texts to the study of culture and cultural value.