Henry James, American Social Change, and Literary Revision
Matthew Peters is a doctoral student at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is writing on Henry James and the relation of fiction to morality.
This article argues that Henry James’s central concern in The American Scene was to find a way to write about a country in which democracy was effacing individuality, manners and forms. Reading The American Scene alongside James’s lecture ‘The Question of our Speech’, and comparing James’s conception of social change with his theories on literary revision in his Prefaces to the New York edition, the author argues that James reconciled himself to American social change by recognising that the new social and cultural practices that American life fostered were as interesting to a writer as the lost forms and manners.