Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James

This study re-locates the work of Henry James by revealing parallels between the aestheticism of John Ruskin and that of James. It explores a mix of well-known fictional texts alongside James’s essays and tales, which are less frequently analysed, but which, nevertheless, offer important insights into James’s attitude to his artistic method. Tracing James’s early development in comparison with Ruskin’s, this book also explores German Romantic thought and the idealism of Kant, Goethe and Hegel. While examining the German connections with James, this study is also alert to James’s relations with Walter Pater and French realism, to which James became increasingly close in the mid-1880s.

Rather than placing James within one single category, it demonstrates how James interfused Romanticism and realism in establishing his own form of aestheticism. Shedding light on James’s period of apprenticeship, this book therefore articulates the Victorian concept of ‘aestheticism’ as used by James and Ruskin.