Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson is held up as a paragon of the type of author who is are the forefront of the movement to improve critical appreciate and respect for the novel. He is positioned as a writer who fulfills the call of James for the novelist to push the boundaries of what is possible within the form by refusing to limit their exploration of the inherent storytelling possibilities within the novel as a device. As he observes in what can rightfully be termed one of the highest critical honors he is capable of delivering, “Each of [Stevenson’s]books is an independent effort — a window opened to a different view.”
Alphonse Daudet
Daudet is a French writer who is probably most famous to Americans for his short story, “The Last Lesson.” Within the first half of the opening paragraph of his critical review, James identifies Daudet as an “admirable genius” who “is at the head of his profession.” That profession in particular was not short story writer, but novelist. This is hardly to say that Daudet escapes the wickedly sharp poison pen which James could wield when confronted with writing that fails to live up to his expectations. Elsewhere, for example, he takes Daudet to task for creating in one novel what he terms a “horrid little heroine” who acts as little more than a “mechanical doll” within the narrative she is placed. This is an excellent example of one of the fundamental approaches to literary criticism which James demanded: that each individual work by a writer is approached on its own merits but with the intent of inserting into the overall comprehensive body of work.
Nathanael Hawthorne
In 1879, James published his career-spanning review of the literary career of Nathanael Hawthorne. In reality, the result of this research is not just critical analysis of the works of the legendary author, but is also part biography and part expression of his own critical philosophy of writing fiction. He also stirred at the time of its release quite a bit of controversy due to his reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s own commentary about the peculiar difficulties facing the American author in the “writing a Romance” about this country lacking so many aspects conditioned into European writers by history.
Walter Besant
“The Art of Fiction” might exist in another form, but would not exist in its current form were it not for Walter Besant. James was motivated to his essay which leaps to the defense of the novel as a viable and vital art form alive with unfulfilled promise by a lecture which British novelist Besant delivered at the Royal Institution. Of particular interest to James was the idea which Besant proposed that the crafting of a novel should abide by certain rigidly applied rules using language generally reserved for visual arts: perspective and proportion existing within harmony with each other. James argues that the as-yet-unrealized power of the novel actually in just the opposite, in unleashing the freedom of creative expression for each author to arrive at the novel with bringing their own individual experiences and manner of relating them through fiction.
