Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
Literary Impressionism and Its Critics
Messy Impressionism

Chapter 1. Sense of Justice: Ruskin, Whistler, and James
Ruskin, Whistler, and the Experiment Upon Public Submissiveness
Disorderly Characters
Haze, Riddle, and Blot

Chapter 2. A Chain of Secret Influences: Pater's Disciples
George Moore's Likes and Dislikes
Oscar Wilde's Intellect
Arthur Symons's Restraint
Conrad/Kurtz's Circles of Influence

Chapter 3. Fugitive Imaginings: Art, Nationhood, and George Moore's Racial Instincts
England, Ireland, and the Nation-Family
Moore's Real Country

Chapter 4. Shocks and Surprises: Conrad, Terrorism, and Languages of Sensation
Impressionism, Journalism, and the Booming of Anarchism
The Shock of the Information
Professing Terrorism
After-Effects: Wells, Ford, Woolf, and War

Chapter 5. Violent Moments of Being: Woolf, Pater, and Fry
Reacting Against Impressionism
Distracted and Disconnected Thoughts
Gleams & Lights: Woolf, Pater, and Sculpture
Pater and the Patriarchal Machine
Roger Fry, Roger Fry, and the Rhetoric of Personality


Chapter 6. The Typical Man of His Period: Ford's Depression
Politico-economics
Soft-Boiled Fiction
Professing Progress


Epilogue: Bowen's Demolished Moment, 432
Notes, 439

About the Author

Adam Parkes is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Modernism and the Theater of Censorship and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day: A Reader's Guide.

Reviews

"A Sense of Shock is, as its title suggests, a bold, inevitable book. Never before has literary impressionism been dissected with such precision and-even more dazzlingly-such imagination. The connections between this too-often slighted art and its historical circumstances (anarchism, terrorism, nationalism, feminism, homosexuality) are shown to end nowhere, making it impossible to conceive of impressionism merely as an aesthetic procedure. Adam
Parkes is as robust, as myriad-minded, as his subject, and he has written a book not just for scholars, not just for writers, but for anyone interested in language as an ongoing force in our lives." --James
Longenbach
"Parkes writes with a pleasingly crisp and authoritative style. A Sense of Shock makes a decisive intervention in this developing field of studies of literary impressionism, and an excellent contribution to the literary history of the period." --Max Saunders, King's College London
"Parkes' wide-ranging, revealing study of literary impressionism from Ruskin, Pater, and James through Elizabeth Bowen explores the place of history and politics within impressionism and of impressionism within history. His footnotes provide an encyclopedic education about the critical discourse on impressionism, and his illuminating chapters establish the revisionary perspective: that the inward turn, rather than denying the significance of history, regularly
invites us to understand impressionism as historically embedded and engaged in a dialectic of public and private, context and text, non-literary and literary, political and aesthetic. A Sense of Shock
sheds new light on a crucial strand of literary modernism." --John Paul Riquelme, Boston University
"Expansive, ambitious." --Woolf Studies Annual
"An incisive and engaging intervention into the study of literary impressionism...An illuminating monograph about the historicity of impressionism that should prove extrememly useful for literary - especially modernist - scholars." --Journal of British Studies