The Art of Fiction

Description

Henry James’s essay is one of the most influential narratives on the theory of the novel. The Art of Fiction analyzes the state of genre in his lifetime and precisely awaits its increase in the time to come.

James creates his essay as an exclusive and artistic genre and pointed out its important morals for analytic disparagement. The novel was regarded as secondary and an ineligible literature, but his articles were considered as best at light entertainment and worst in catering to delusion and depravity.

The inspiration for his essay was the lecture, “Fiction as One of the Fine Arts” by Walter Besant, a novelist-historian. The lecture was published as an essay with the title “The Art of Fiction”. James came across it and he made an essay as his rebuttal creating the same title as of Besant’s. Eventually, the essays of Besant and James were published as one.

Besant’s article contains three main grounds. Firstly, the narrative of fiction is a fine art and has to be appreciated with the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. Secondly, the application of the general laws in the novel which should be inclined with the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion that patterns the other arts. Thirdly, mastery and application of these rules are important, but are not enough for obtaining success. The writer must also have a dominant, artistic talent and skills.

In rebuttal to Besant’s work, James indicate that the one criterion missing is the importance of giving life to the novel, that it should be entertaining and pleasurable to read. Besant states that fiction should obtain a moral purpose in relation to the writer’s experiences. James argued that a good novel must not be frivolous.

Henry James was an American-British writer considered as one of the most important novelist of the 19th-century with in literary realism.
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