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Abstract
This work examines the transformative experience of art in Jamess fiction. In a 1915 letter to H.G. Wells, James declares that "It is art that makes life", a claim whose rich implications are traced here. The first chapter examines the effect of aesthetic experience on the characters of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), which was written at the height of the British Aesthetic movement. A few years later, in The Bostonians (1885), James suggests the transitional nature of American intellectual and artistic culture as the country begins to cast off the influence of Europe and to trust its own creative voice, a process that is mirrored in the novels characters. In short, art in this novel affects and reveals both the national and the individual consciousness. The Tragic Muse (1890) revisits Jamess complicated relationship with the late nineteenth-century controversy over Aestheticism. This chapter presents a reading of the title character that strongly resists the dominant perception that Miriam lacks depth. The final chapter of this study contends that in Jamess late phase novel, The Wings of the Dove (1902), the responses of individual consciousness to a Bronzino and a Veronese painting are central to the novels conclusion. This novel contains strong Paterian and Ruskinian echoes, and in it James works out his lingering ambivalences toward the ideas of these two well-known art critics. Situated within nineteenth-century aesthetic theories and cultural moments, this project as a whole suggests that in Jamess novels, art does make life.