"Surprises that struck the hour": The Tragic Muse and the Modernizing of the Jamesian Serial

This essay reexamines Henry James's The Tragic Muse in terms of both its serialization in the Atlantic Monthly (January 1889-May 1890) and its complex mediation of an emergent aesthetic of seriality. Concentrating on its reevaluation of the aesthetic possibilities of the mass cultural magazine novel in terms of a nascent "serial attitude"—an engagement with the concept of series variously undertaken by the aesthetic-intellectual avant-garde at the turn of the century—this essay reinterprets Muse's oft-noted structural idiosyncrasies as part of its prescient conceptualization of the narrative techniques that would eventually come to be defined as "Jamesian."