Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Rise of the Art-Novel and the Question of Class 1 Certain Novels 1 Mental Labor 10 Methodological Philistinism: From Difference to Distinction 19 One: The Mind's Eye and Mental Labor: Forms of Distinction in the Fiction of Henry James 30 The Novel as Masterpiece 30 Epistemologies of Social Class 42 The Romance of Romance: Virtue Unrewarded 49 Divisive Perspectivism 53 Two: Social Geometries: Taking Place in the Jamesian Modernist Text 57 The Hidden Dimensions of Class 57 Fictions of the Class 66 Extraordinary Readers 74 Three: Downward Mobilities: The Prison of the Womb and the Architecture of Career in Stephen Crane 78 House of Fiction, House of Shame 78 Urban Ambitions: Crane, Wharton, O. Henry 85 Transient Occupations: From Howells to Crane to Dos Passos 102 Four: Highbrows and Du b Blondes: Literary Intellectuals and the Romance of Intelligence 106 Playing Dumb with Anita Loos 106 Bad Students and Smart Sets 111 Morons and Moralizers: The Eugenic Romance 118 Smart White Blacks: Mencken, Stein, and Race 124 Pastoral Intellection 129 Five: Faulkner's Ambit: Modernism, Regionalism, and the Location of Cultural Capital 135 Racinations: A Deeper South 135 Relations: Modernism and Mules 146 Six Making "Literature" of It: Dashiell Ha ett and the Mysteries of High Culture 158 God, Mammon, and Willard Wright 158 Murdering Representation 166 Afterword: Mobius Fictions 177 Notes 183 Index 215

Promotional Information

The Novel Art may be a 'first book' in a technical sense, but it is much more than that. In ambition, range, subtlety and sophistication, it is fully mature and accomplished, easily the match of anything currently being produced in the various fields into which it enters. Ranging through and across period, genre, and critical lines, Mark McGurl makes a compelling set of arguments with wit and panache. His book exemplifies what it anatomizes--it gives us the intellectual thrill of watching a playful intelligence take up something we thought we knew, and show us things we had never seen there before. It is very important indeed. -- Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

About the Author

Mark McGurl is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

Reviews

"[This] intriguing book traces James's efforts to promote the Anglo-American novel as not only higher than mere popular entertainment but as a potential claimant for fine art... McGurl's book is highly recommended and a successor to Henry James's The Art of the Novel."--Choice