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 "The constitution of Henry James as ‘the Master’ has much to do with his particular achievement as a literary ironist. Irony determines literary authority as a model of detachment and control; a professionalized form of the aesthetic disinterest that was theoretically consolidated in Kantian and Romantic aesthetics. James’s career presents a geographic and cultural model for the acquisition of aesthetic detachment, where the American writer and traveller acquires the authority of irony by a process of transatlantic bildung. Becoming European, the acquisition of a cosmopolitan identity, is a process of refinement established through a particular kind of ironic performance which James himself epitomised. Yet in his fiction and criticism James himself was clearly troubled by the nature of irony, both in terms of personality and literary practice." |
