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The Possibilities of the Novel: A Look Back on the James-Wells Debate

This essay examines the extended debate between Henry James and H. G. Wells through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s voluminous writings on literature, the novel, and narrative more generally. Reading the exchange in terms other than those of a dominant ethical ideology casts new light on the very different projects executed on each side of the divide: the divide between James and Wells but also, as James Woods’s recent review of David Mitchell’s fiction makes evident, between what remains a still active distinction between the novel and storytelling, “high” and “low” fiction, and, ultimately, art and culture.