Literary Impressionism And Modernist Aesthetics

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

Jane Goldman offers a revisionary, feminist reading of Woolf's work. Focusing on Woolf's engagement with the artistic theories of her time, Goldman analyzes Woolf's fascination with the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1920 and the solar eclipse of 1927 by linking her response to a much wider literary and cultural context. Illustrated with color pictures, this book will appeal not only to scholars working on Woolf, but also to students of modernism, art history, and women's studies.

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.

With its new innovations in the visual arts, cinema and photography as well as the sciences of memory and perception, the early twentieth century saw a crisis in the relationship between what was seen and what was known. Literary Impressionism charts that modernist crisis of vision and the way that literary impressionists such as Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., and May Sinclair used new concepts of memory in order to bridge the gap between perception and representation. Exploring the fiction of these four major writers as well as their journalism, manifesto writings, letters and diaries from the archives, Rebecca Bowler charts the progression of modernism's literary aesthetics and the changing role of memory within it.

A Sense of Shock examines the various, complex relations between impressionist texts and contexts in modern British and Irish works by Bowen, Conrad, Ford, James, Wilde, Woolf, and others, to argue that literary impressionism was an emphatically historical phenomenon.

The essays in Modernism and Colonialism offer revisionary accounts of major British and Irish literary modernists relation to colonialism.

This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.

The Companion combines a broad grounding in the essential texts and contexts of the modernist movement with the unique insights of scholars whose careers have been devoted to the study of modernism. An essential resource for students and teachers of modernist literature and culture Broad in scope and comprehensive in coverage Includes more than 60 contributions from some of the most distinguished modernist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Brings together entries on elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art Features 25 essays on the signal texts of modernist literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Pays close attention to both British and American modernism