"Inevitable irruption": Henry James's The Awkward Age, Harper's Weekly, and the Spanish-American War

This article examines the serial publication of Henry James's The Awkward Age in Harper's Weekly from October 1898 to January 1899, arguing for a surprising interrelationship between the novel and the magazine's coverage of the Spanish-American War during its run. In particular, the article makes a case for the significance of the centerfold illustrations of the war that frequently interrupt The Awkward Age and their uncanny illumination of the novel's dialogic, anti-pictorial investment in a language of shock and violence and its ambivalent critique of masculine privilege and detachment. Where James's novel turns around the social and erotic complications of Nanda Brookenham's compromised "irruption" into the marital marketplace, it hints also at an awareness of its own compromised cultural capital in the context of its circulation in Harper's and of its inevitable embroilment in the magazine's promotion of its own wartime coverage. James's mixed feelings about American imperialism in 1898, echoing editorial attitudes at Harper's, oddly register in The Awkward Age's treatment of Nanda's traffic between men: the novel's drama of manners transposes wartime debates—in relation to newly acquired territories in Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—about civilization, acculturation, expansion, possession, and abandonment.