ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the rise of mass culture in James’s early internationally themed fiction as an index of a developing modern cosmopolitanism. While fiction such as Daisy Miller, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Reverberator characterize Americans as unable to posit cultural parity with Europeans, the beginnings of a commercial phase of cosmopolitanism are discerned in the scenes of art collecting purchases and the dominance of sensational journalism. The influential role that Americans’ mass culture played on national affiliation surfaces in James’s representations of American characters in Europe. The author disturbs to eventually repair the genre “romance” as a metaphor for nation-building and national identity construction.
