Henry James is a large figure in the development of culture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He stood at the origins of modernist literature and techniques of subjective writing which later developed into the well-known “stream of consciousness” technique.
Henry James was called a master during his lifetime. Most of his novels were met with approval my critics and James was often called “the first American novelist.”
Henry James was one of the first writers to consciously experiment with the literary form. He sought to see and portray life in a new way, using new methods of narration. The novel, he wrote in his famous essay The Art of Fiction, must satisfy only one requirement: to be interesting.
The essay The Art of Fiction was published in 1884 in Longman’s Magazine. It appeared as a respond to lecture by Sir Walter Besant, in which he asserts that the main purpose of literature is to carry a moral criterion. Henry James disagrees with such a position and claims that a novel is an impression of life, which in turn is an imprint left on one’s mind. Thus, James preferred describing not an event, but someone's impression of it. The technique he developed for dramatizing the hero’s thoughts left a deep mark in the history of literature.
