"The Dreary Duty": Henry James, The Yellow Book, and Literary Personality

This essay examines Henry James's involvement with The Yellow Book, to which he contributed several stories of writers in the mid-1890s. Approaching this relationship largely from the perspective of the magazine's editors and publisher, the essay contends that the magazine used not James's fiction but his reputation as an aloof aesthete to promote itself, but also that James saw this appropriation of his "personality" as an opportunity to write in his stories a meta-commentary on the very act of contributing to the magazine and on his unhappy participation in the culture of publicity more generally.