Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
WHEN Henry James began work on The American in 1875, he was impelled by three interconnected needs, all to do with finding the “right forms.” He had to give shape to his nascent career by driving it forward in the direction that would best enhance his reputation as a promising young writer; he had to decide what authorial perspective to take on the material he treated in his narrative and whether to guide it toward the literary genre of the romance (locus of the fanciful) or the novel (seat of the realist); he had to define to his own satisfaction what the American character was in relation, first, to the United States, which he perceived as essentially formless, and, second, to a foreign culture whose historical forms were all too rigidly in place.
It was mid-1876 by the time James completed his story of Christopher Newman, the freewheeling American millionaire abroad in the Paris where James had felt himself at odds. While James was busy raising questions about where habits of independence and self-reliance got a man like Newman and pursuing his unofficial exposition of the meaning of “the American,” his compatriots were gathering back home in Philadelphia to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the nation's severance from the Old World in 1776. Many were responding with patriotic pride to the lavishly stocked exhibition halls of the 1876 centennial, which appeared to give credence to the belief that the United States had come very far very fast over the past century – as a growing political power, as the catalyst for astonishing technological achievements, and as the champion of a democratic culture.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.