James’s Writer-Hero: A Modernist Icon

This study examines the evolution of Henry James’s modernist portrait of the writer-artist in his ultimately symbiotic relation to the reader-critic. In developing this subject, which became both a theme and a strategy for his fictions about writers, James dramatised not only the external experience of the writer-artist in society, but also the increasingly complex and comprehensive imaginative life of the writer as both the agent and the audience of his fiction. Moreover, in characterising himself in the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his work as his own best reader and critic, James created the most complete portrayal we have of the reader as interpretive complicitor of the writer-artist. In a highly original and self-conscious body of fiction and theory about writers and critics James also laid the foundation of his now widely acknowledged place as one of the first literary modernists, for this work illustrates a central tenet of his mature artistry: the necessary authority of the individual consciousness in defining and interpreting reality, in fiction as in life. His emphasis upon individual consciousness led to a portrayal of the writer-reader relationship that now appears prescient in view of current reader-response theory.1