"Heaven save the market!": Henry James in the Fin de Siècle Literary Field

Abstract

Abstract: This article situates James's late nineteenth-century career within the context of the British literary field. Taking The Princess Casamassima (1886) as an example, I recast the novel's socialist drama as an exploration of tensions between aesthetic autonomy and external commitment, especially the pressures of a commercial literary marketplace. While James vies for simultaneous critical and commercial success in mid-career novels like Princess , after its commercial failure he turns to a new "experiment": seeking these polarized incentives in separately designated experimental and marketable works.