What Was Literary Impressionism?

What Was Literary Impressionism? PDF Author: Michael Fried
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision. But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends. What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.

What Was Literary Impressionism?

What Was Literary Impressionism? PDF Author: Michael Fried
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision. But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends. What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.

Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics

Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics PDF Author: Jesse Matz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521803527
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This 2001 study addresses the problems of perception and representation that occupied modernist writers such as James, Conrad and Woolf.

Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë

Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë PDF Author: Todd K. Bender
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780815319436
Category : Art and literature
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.

Literary Impressionisms

Literary Impressionisms PDF Author: Camilla Storskog
Publisher: Ledizioni
ISBN: 885526043X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book aims to locate and draw out resonances of impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish prose at the end of the nineteenth century, a field hitherto overlooked in the critical debate on literary impressionism. In order to frame the many alternative approaches to this issue, it examines the use of the term ‘literary impressionism’ not only on the Scandinavian scene but also in an international context. By focussing on three landmark discussions in the Nordic countries (Herman Bang, the Kristiania Bohème, August Strindberg), an inclusive, wide-ranging Scandinavian understanding of the relationship between impressionism and literature is advanced. The texts chosen for closer scrutiny disclose this extensive interpretation of impressionist writing: Helena Westermarck’s short story Aftonstämning (Evening Mood) from 1890 is read as an example of interart transposition, Stella Kleve’s novels and short stories are seen as indicative of the narrative modes of a literary impressionism drawing on scenic representation, but also present textual features such as the ‘metonymic mode’ and ‘delayed decoding’, elements that are central to the international approach to impressionist prose. The concluding analysis of fictional impressionists in the works of authors such as Gustaf af Geijerstam, Mathilda Roos, and Georg Nordensvan sketches a many-sided portrait of the impressionist painter while remaining true to this study’s pluralistic approach by including a discussion of K.A. Tavaststjerna’s Impressionisten (The Impressionist) from 1892, whose protagonist is not an artist but a hypersensitive, impressionable subject. This last section also investigates how fiction is used to convey a critical discussion of the means and methods of painterly impressionism, as well as the function of the use of the visual arts in these texts.

Impressionist Subjects

Impressionist Subjects PDF Author: Tamar Katz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Exploring the intersection of ideas about woman, subjectivity, and literary authority, Impressionist Subjects reveals the female subject as crucial in framing contradictions central to modernism, particularly the tension between modernism's claim to timeless art and its critique of historical conditions. Against the backdrop of the New Woman movement of the 1890s, Tamar Katz establishes literary impressionism as integral to modernist form and to the modernist project of investigating the nature and function of subjectivity. Focusing on a duality common to impressionism and contemporary ideas of feminine subjectivity, Katz shows how the New Woman reconciled the paradox of a subject at once immersed in the world and securely enclosed in a mysterious interiority. Book chapters feature discussion of modernists including Walter Pater, George Egerton, Sarah Grand, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. Sophisticated and tightly argued, Impressionist Subjects is a substantial contribution to the reassessment and expansion of the modernist fiction canon.

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public

Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public PDF Author: Daniel Hannah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317122569
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers original readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere’s shifting forms.

German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832-1899

German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832-1899 PDF Author: Clayton Koelb
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9781571132505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
New essays providing an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in social and political context. This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following the editors' introduction, essays consider the impact of Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effectsof major movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the changing cultural scene. The second section presents overviews of the principal movements ofthe time (Junges Deutschland, Vormärz, Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. The final section provides bibliographical resources in the form of a critical bibliography and a list of primary sources. Contributors to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature, culture, and history from North America andEurope: Andrew Webber, Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau, Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer. Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is Associate Professor of German at the same institution.

Lasting Impressions

Lasting Impressions PDF Author: Jesse Matz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543050
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely "impressionistic" about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies—the positive and the negative—to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.

A History of the Modernist Novel

A History of the Modernist Novel PDF Author: Gregory Castle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107034957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
A History of the Modernist Novel reassesses the modernist canon and produces a wealth of new comparative analyses that radically revise the novel's history. It also considers the novel's global reach while suggesting that the epoch of modernism is not yet finished.

Impressionism

Impressionism PDF Author: Robert L. Herbert
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300050836
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Examines the use of cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and the seaside in impressionist French paintings