Introduction: First Impressions: The Impact of Impressionism on English Literature

In recent years, much attention has been paid to what Daniel Albright called the "panaesthetic" impulse of nineteenth-and twentieth-century writing, particularly in relation to impressionism.1 The aim of the present special issue is to consolidate our understanding of the language, aesthetics, and contexts of impressionism and to re-examine their relevance to Anglophone literature in light of recent developments in the field and in literary studies more broadly. The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the notion of "Literary Impressionism"—a phrase now used not only to describe a nebulous assemblage of writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who invoked the figure of the impression, but also to designate a certified literary mode.2 Indeed, there is an established tradition in which a handful of novelists—most commonly Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Henry James—are said to have exemplified, if not to have inaugurated, the art of impressionist writing. The basic facts are that impressionism was a visual style or "movement" born in nineteenth-century Paris, and associated with a group of painters—Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, etc.—who said that their art was about impressions. Other critics have worried that "literary impressionism has been seen as effectively disengaged from the culture that produced it," or as a relic of an outdated modernist ideology of aesthetic purity.11 They have therefore attempted to situate various novelists who made use of the impression in relation to their historical contexts, ranging from the Victorian art world (in James) to fin-de-siècle conceptions of sexuality (in Egerton, Wilde, and Pater); from Edwardian imperialism (in Conrad and Moore) to the Great Depression (in Ford).