Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics

Hardback

Main Details

Title Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Jesse Matz
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:290
Dimensions(mm): Height 229,Width 152
Category/GenreLiterary theory
Literary studies - from c 1900 -
Literary studies - fiction, novelists and prose writers
ISBN/Barcode 9780521803526
ClassificationsDewey:823.91209112
Audience
Professional & Vocational

Publishing Details

Publisher Cambridge University Press
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publication Date 2 August 2001
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

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 favored 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.

Author Biography

Jesse Matz is assistant professor of English at Harvard University.

Reviews

'... this vibrant study is bound to be noticed, quoted, and remembered. And in setting a new standard for commentary on an often intractable topic, it may even set off a revived - and revitalized - debate.' Modernism/Modernity