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.

About the Author
John Scholar is a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading

Reviews
What emerges from his discussion is a vivid account not only of the ways in which James's protagonists sift through and reflect on impressions, but also of the ways in which his characters seek to artifice and impose impressions of their own, and of how such impressions may threaten either to obscure or illuminate (or both). It is the richness and depth of this account that constitutes the value of Scholar's book. * Rob Harris, University of Bristol, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism *
This fully convincing take on the value of the performative impression closes a superb intellectual history. There is nothing lacking in Scholar's wonderfully discriminating, precise account ... That such a richly complex set of explanations should also flow so briskly and clearly, in such lucid prose, is remarkable. * Jesse Matz, American Literary History Online Review *
Scholar's work... paints a compelling picture of James's investment in the impression as a term with a deep genealogy and complicated resonance, driving his fictional explorations of empiricism, aesthetics, and memory. * Daniel Hannah, The Review of English Studies *
Henry James and the Art of Impressions offers clearer terms through which to see the impression, beyond a simple historical account of a "keyword of the age"... Scholar shows us that, in James's use of the impression, we see a mind uniquely at work in the spaces between perception and reflection, imagination and reality, a mind on which very little was lost. * Jeffrey C. Kessler, Victorian Studies Vol 65.1 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198853510
Author John Scholar
Format Hardback
Page Count 310
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 602g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 163mm * 22mm