I bet that appreciating what they’re really talking about would require digging into a broader debate about the best approaches to, and attitude toward the writing of, good literature, which was a decades-long topic among a bunch of major figures in literature in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I mean, there are probably always such debates going on to some degree, but this is a specific one that saw James and some fellows on a side opposed to a bunch of other authors. I only know about it because I happen to have read part of a book of criticism of EM Forster earlier this year, and I gather that debate was kinda the major topic among that set for a long while (Forster was on the opposite side of it from James)