This book argues that literary impressionism was historical. Considering a range of modern British writers from the 1870s to the 1930s, the book shows how impressionism was shaped by active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age: anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media. The book begins with Henry James’s response to the Ruskin-Whistler dispute, examines the controversies of Walter Pater’s circle, George Moore’s heterodox responses to nationalism in Britain and Ireland, Joseph Conrad’s ... More

This book argues that literary impressionism was historical. Considering a range of modern British writers from the 1870s to the 1930s, the book shows how impressionism was shaped by active engagement with larger cultural phenomena that defined the modern age: anarchism and terrorism, homosexuality and feminism, nationalism and war, economic depression and the new global media. The book begins with Henry James’s response to the Ruskin-Whistler dispute, examines the controversies of Walter Pater’s circle, George Moore’s heterodox responses to nationalism in Britain and Ireland, Joseph Conrad’s representations of terrorism, Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the shocks of patriarchy, and Ford Madox Ford’s fictional account of the Great Depression, and concludes with an Epilogue on the impact of the Blitz on Elizabeth Bowen’s spy fiction. Each of these chapters illustrates Parkes’s central thesis that the formal and stylistic practices of literary impressionism emerged from dynamic and often provocative interactions between aesthetic and historical factors. Thus the book suggests how impressionism’s widely attested psychological and philosophical dimensions were inextricable from its public, historical dimensions.