ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century, Henry James was ideally positioned to negotiate and to reflect upon the cultures of print through which he disseminated his works. As an American citizen by birth and as a resident of England, James was able to exploit his situation to effectively maximize his advantages – both in terms of marketing his texts in multiple forms on both sides of the Atlantic and in terms of experimenting with the multiple landscapes of print culture available to him.1 I refer to the various material formats through which James published his work as “landscapes” because the word evokes the sense of a constructed view that is not natural, but manmade – a framed perspective designed to emphasize a particular viewpoint, to serve particular generic purposes, and to meet specific expectations for different audiences. I read James’s career-long experimentation with different formats for circulating his texts as indicative of his enduring interest in the ways in which new fields of vision and publishing contexts could interact with his artistic experimentations. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, as James was beginning to develop a style more akin to later modernist fiction and less similar to the realist narratives of his early career, he began to explore the new venue of theatre and also focused on producing shorter narratives that he usually published first in magazines and newspapers. As James wrote and published his story “The Real Thing” in 1892, he was poised at a transitional moment in his literary development, and he used his vantage point to access and to assess both American and British cultures of print. James’s production of this story is an important starting point for my larger argument; his transition into a style that would come to shape a modernist aesthetic was intimately related to his increasing investigation of how different material forms of textuality and circulation shape reading in modernity.2 In other words, I argue that for James, this story functioned as a literary experiment in transatlantic print culture. Rather than expressing an anxiety about the masses of readers who would read his story through its popular periodical sites of publication – in the illustrated periodical Black and White magazine and in multiple American newspapers – James constructed the form and content of his story to play with the material form of its publishing contexts. The story – thematically and formally – experiments with its embeddedness within the landscape of transatlantic print culture.
