Abstract

“Conscience of the Atelier” claims that Henry James worked out in his criticism a view about the relation of prose technique to moral interest. That insight arose for James gradually, from his first reviews of Flaubert, which operate with a clear distinction between moral interest and concern with fictional technique (what F. R. Leavis derisively called the “post-Flaubertian conscience of the atelier”), through his study of Nathaniel Hawthorneand up to the preface he added to his novel The Ambassadors . James, I argue, came finally to believe that, pace Leavis, a “conscience of the atelier” and moral interest were one and the same; a view which comes to its fullest articulation in a 1915 letter to H.G. Wells.

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