Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics

ISBN-13:	9780521803526
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/02/2001
Pages:	290
Sales rank:	520,072
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)
Lexile:	1450L (what's this?)

Matz examines the writing of such modernists as James, Conrad and Woolf, who used the word "impression" to describe what they wanted their fiction to present. Matz argues that these writers did not favor 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. This study addresses the problems of perception and representation that occupied writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.