What was literary impressionism? / Michael Fried.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fried, Michael, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Impressionism in literature.

Visual perception in literature.

Modernism (Literature).

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (409 pages) ; illustrations, maps

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"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.

The most famous statement associated with the idea of literary impressionism is Joseph Conrad's from the Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897): "My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make to feel - it is, before all, to make you see! That - and no more: and it is everything!" What exactly Conrad meant by "make you see" has, of course always been a question, but all commentators have been agreed that it chiefly concerned with making the reader visualize the scenes narrated by the writer. This book argues that what is distinctive about English-language literary impressionism - a movement or tendency the author locates chronologically between 1890 and 1914 - is not only the desire to make the reader see but also, crucially, what it is the reader is to be made to see. The authors treated in this study include Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad (four of whose novels are analyzed in detail), Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert Louis Stevenson.--

Contents:

Introduction: The Upturned Page

1. Almayer's face

2. Invisible writing

3. Ford's impressionism

4. Some impressionist (and non-impressionist) faces

5. "A blankness to run at and dash your head against"

6. Maps, charts, and mist

7. The writing of revolution

8. Versions of regression

9. How literary impressionism ended

Coda: Four modernists.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

9780674980792

9780674984950

0674984951

9780674984974

0674984978

OCLC:

1030438179