Literary Impressionism: Vision and Memory in Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D. and May Sinclair

Description

With its new innovations in the visual arts, cinema and photography as well as the sciences of memory and perception, the early twentieth century saw a crisis in the relationship between what was seen and what was known. Literary Impressionism charts that modernist crisis of vision and the way that literary impressionists such as Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., and May Sinclair used new concepts of memory in order to bridge the gap between perception and representation. Exploring the fiction of these four major writers as well as their journalism, manifesto writings, letters and diaries from the archives, Rebecca Bowler charts the progression of modernism's literary aesthetics and the changing role of memory within it.

Rebecca Bowler is Lecturer in Twentieth Century English Literature at Keele University, UK and was Research Associate on the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project. She is co-founder of the May Sinclair Society.

Subtle and compelling ... [Bowler] lists a striking range of writers described by recent criticism as impressionist ... shows superbly how all her writers, like Proust, need temporal distance from their experience in order to experience it fully. * Times Literary Supplement *