Book Description

Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement, which championed impressionist criticism. Yet time and again he used the word 'impression' to represent the most intense moments of consciousness of his characters, as well as the work of the literary artist. Henry James and the Art of Impressions argues that the literary art of the impression, as James practised it, places his work within the wider cultural history of impressionism. Henry James and the Art of Impressions offers an unprecedentedly detailed cultural and intellectual history of the impression. It draws on philosophy, psychology, literature, critical theory, intellectual influences and aesthetics to study James's early art criticism, literary criticism, travel writing, prefaces, and the three great novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. It argues that the coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when they are comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics - bound together by James's attempt to reconcile the novel's value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity. Henry James and the Art of Impressions traces the development of the impression across a range of disciplines to show how James's use of the word owes them cultural and intellectual debt. It offers a more philosophical account of James to complement the more historicist work of recent decades.