ABSTRACT
This chapter asserts that James considered advertising a complex art with techniques that rivaled, rather than simply imitated, those deployed in fine-art forms. Incorporating developments in American advertising into his late writing style, James both exploited and helped give credibility to an emerging business culture that increasingly relied on pictorial representation circulated in advertisements, posters, and illustrated newspapers. James recognized that advertising (as well as the novel) was allied with media forms arising out of inscription technologies such as photography, cinema, telegraphy, and phonographic sound recording and reproduction, in contrast to older visual art forms, such as painting and theater.
