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What Was Literary Impressionism?
About This Book
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feelâit is, before all, to make you see. Thatâand 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.
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Index
- Advertising, 87, 153, 153, 293
- After Dinner at Ornans (Courbet), 2, 5
- âAgainst Theoryâ (Knapp and Michaels), 26
- Agency, writerâs, 145
- Albino, in The Invisible Man, 84
- Aldington, Richard, 139
- Alliteration, 61, 62, 250, 264
- âAlmayerâs Faceâ (Fried), 23
- Almayerâs Folly (Conrad), 23, 28â57, 146, 311; blankness in, 32â33, 37, 38; desire in, 31; erasure in, 35, 36â37, 38, 39, 42, 49, 127, 252; faces in, 29, 32â33, 35, 37, 43, 126, 275, 347â348n17; first page of, 40; forgiving in, 31; shadows in, 344n7; violence in, 182â183; Wellsâs review of, 62
- Ambassadors, The (James), 293
- Anarchists, 184. See also The Secret Agent
- Antitheatricality, 327
- Anxiety, blank page and, 53
- Arctic, 83, 84
- Audience, indifference to, 327
- Aural, relation with visual, 298, 299â301, 304, 308â309, 314
- Author: agency of, 145; invisibility of, 74, 77, 79, 293â294; relation with page, 56
- Authorial double, absence of, 174
- Autobiography: Fordâs (see Portraits from Life; Return to Yesterday); Hudsonâs, 93; Wellsâs, 74, 84â85, 88, 91, 153, 195â196, 197, 251
- Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), 321â322
- âAutocracy and Warâ (Conrad), 259
- Automatic phenomena, 104
- Automatic writing, 103, 108, 122, 321
- Automatism, 26, 92, 137; in âBestre,â 319; in Conradâs works, 180; in Cunninghame Grahamâs works, 131; in The Secret Agent, 163, 166
- Automimesis, 22
- Autosuggestion, 22, 372â373n40
- Bailin, Miriam, 105
- Bann, Stephen, 23
- âBeast in the Jungle, Theâ (James), 23, 156â160, 293
- âBeattock for Moffatâ (Cunninghame Graham), 132â133, 298â299
- âBecause of the Dollarsâ (Conrad), 182, 244, 382n20
- Beresford, J. D., 197
- Berryman, John, 7
- âBestreâ (Lewis), 317â320
- Birds, 298; aerial nature of, 64, 65; in Green Mansions, 66â67; Hudson and, 58, 63, 64; language of, 64â66; in Return to Yesterday, 122â123
- Birds and Man (Hudson)...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Frontispiece
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraphs
- Introduction: The Upturned Page
- One: Almayerâs Face
- Two: Invisible Writing
- Three: Fordâs Impressionism
- Four: Some Impressionist (and Non-Impressionist) Faces
- Five: âA Blankness to Run At and Dash Your Head Againstâ
- Six: Maps, Charts, and Mist
- Seven: The Writing of Revolution
- Eight: Versions of Regression
- Nine: How Literary Impressionism Ended
- Coda: Four Modernists
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index