Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics

by Jesse Matz

• ISBN13: 9780521803526
• ISBN10: 0521803527
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Jesse Matz examines the writing of such modernists as Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, who used the word 'impression' to describe what they wanted their fiction to present. Matz redefines literary Impressionism, focusing on the way that impressions destroy standard perceptual distinctions between thinking and sensing, believing and suspecting. He argues that these writers favoured not immediate subjective sense, but rather a mode that would mediate perceptual distinctions. Just as impressions fall somewhere between thought and sense, Impressionist fiction occupies the middle ground between opposite ways of engaging with the world. Matz also argues that the resulting confusion becomes a basic plot feature of modernist fiction. This wide-ranging study addresses the problems of perception and representation that occupied writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction Proust's deathless analogy	1	(11)
Impressions of modernity	12	(41)
Pater's homoerotic impression	53	(26)
The woman of genius	79	(51)
``Call down Dolly''	79	(6)
James and the woman of genius	85	(35)
Hardy's defensive impression	120	(10)
The distant laborer	130	(44)
Proust in Eulalie's bedroom	130	(8)
Conrad's distant laborer	138	(17)
Ford's peasant cabman	155	(19)
Woolf's phenomenological impression	174	(33)
Three Impressionist allegories	207	(43)
Conclusion	239	(11)
Mrs. Brown
Mrs. Bell
Notes	250	(25)
Index	275