
Henry James criticized the impressionism that was revolutionizing French painting and fiction. He satirized the British aesthetic movement whose keystone was impressionist criticism. So why, time and again in important parts of his literary work, did James use the word 'impression'? Henry James and the Art of Impressions argues that James tried to wrest the impression from the impressionists and to recast it in his own art of the novel. Interdisciplinary in its range, philosophical and literary in its focus, the book shows the place of James's work within the wider cultural history of impressionism. It draws on painting, philosophy, psychology, literature, and critical theory to examine James's art criticism, early literary criticism, travel writing, reflections on his own fiction, and the three great novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. It shows how the language of impressions enables James to represent the most intense moments of consciousness of his characters. It argues that the Jamesian impression is best understood as a family of related ideas bound together by James's attempt to reconcile the novel's value as a mimetic form with its value as a transformative creative activity.
This book investigates why Henry James, despite his public criticism of impressionism in art and literature, consistently employed the term 'impression' as a central concept within his own creative work. The author, John Scholar, examines the tension between James's skepticism toward contemporary impressionist movements and his personal appropriation of the term. By analyzing James's art criticism, travel writing, and major novels, the text argues that James sought to redefine the impression as a tool to reconcile the novel's mimetic function with its capacity for transformative creative expression.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars and literary critics recognize this work as a rigorous contribution to the study of Jamesian aesthetics and late 19th-century intellectual history. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which requires a strong background in literary theory and the works of Henry James to fully appreciate.
Page Count:
309
Publication Date:
2020-01-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
ISBN-10:
0192594931
ISBN-13:
9780192594938
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