Henry James, “The Real Thing”

Mhairi Catriona Pooler (University of Aberdeen)

Ed. by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1892

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Story

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Henry James’s story “The Real Thing” first appeared on April 16 1892 in

Black and White

magazine and was later included in volume XVIII of the

New York Edition

(1907-09) with “Daisy Miller” and eight other short stories. One of James’s “art parables”, as Richard A. Hocks calls them (Hocks, 37), “The Real Thing” is a compact, complex tale concerning the disparity between reality and illusion in art. Suggested to James by an incident related by his friend the

Punch

cartoonist George Du Maurier, the “strange and striking couple” (

The Art of the Novel

, 283) in “The Real Thing” raise issues about the relationship between art and life that recur frequently in James’s criticism as well as in his many stories about artists and writers.

In James’s tale Major and Mrs

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1329 words

Citation: Pooler, Mhairi Catriona. "“The Real Thing”". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 October 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=25288, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Henry James, “The Real Thing”

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