The Sixteenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

This paper examines a prominent but largely under-scrutinized literary form: the novella. My argument is that the novella’s critical neglect in Anglo-American scholarship speaks to something fundamental about its relationship to institutions more broadly, its tendency to slip through the academic and publishing structures that administer most of literary production. Early practitioners of the novella in the US were acutely aware of its slipperiness as a genre. In the preface to “Daisy Miller,” Henry James described his story as “essentially and pre-eminently a nouvelle,” a form “foredoomed at the best, in more cases than not, to editorial disfavor.” Herman Melville’s editorial adviser at Putnam’s Magazine thought “Benito Cereno” was on the whole “striking & well done,” but disliked its length, lamenting “the dreary documents at the end.” In this paper I discuss the publishing conditions that surrounded the release of “Daisy Miller,” seeing in this particular novella a text that self-consciously grapples with the genre’s possibilities and limitations. If the famous New York Edition of James’s collected works represented a late-career attempt to assert the value of the literary against the democratizing forces of mass publication, his investment in the novella earlier in his career suggests an altogether different conception of literary value, a conception that sees in the form of the novella itself a way of forging alternative institutional configurations, ones capable of reconciling the high and the low, the elite and the democratic.