The Origin of Texts: "The Art of Fiction" as Evolutionary Manifesto

This essay positions James's "Art of Fiction" essay in the context of the Darwinian-inspired discourse that saturated literary culture in the decades following the Civil War. Drawing on the roots of this discourse in Kant's and Goethe's theories of morphology, as well as evolutionary concepts drawn from Darwin, in his essay James argues the novel's nature is parallel to that of biological forms and so, like them, should not be constrained in its development by a priori laws or standards of judgment.