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  • A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing
  • Raphaël Ingelbien
Adam Parkes . A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 284 + xv pp. $65.00 (hardcover).

Adam Parkes's wide-ranging study refers to painters from Manet and Whistler to Seurat and Sisley, but from the outset the Impressionism discussed here was always literary in its nature. Undeterred by the inevitable haziness that surrounds the phrase "literary impressionism," Parkes sees it as a condition of the modern aesthetics he explores, and he locates its seminal moment in Walter Pater's famous discussion of the "impression" in the conclusion to The Renaissance. As in many previous genealogies of modernist writing in England, Pater remains the presiding spirit in Parkes's discussions of James, Wilde, Symons, Moore, Conrad, Woolf, and Ford. Much of the originality of Parkes's intervention in that crowded field lies in his determination to link the development of literary impressionism to public contexts that, far from being mere sources of alienation against which an inward-looking aesthetics defined itself, constantly provided new challenges and sources of inspiration for writers. Informed by a thorough mastery of critical debates on his topic (as is demonstrated by no fewer than fifty-seven pages of endnotes), Parkes's lively reading of modernist prose sets out to go beyond investigations of artistic or philosophical contexts for the rise of literary impressionism and to rebut Fredric Jameson's view of Impressionism as an elitist retreat from mass culture into a private language of pure form. Impressionist aesthetics are rather shown to engage in public discussions that centered on new technologies (from dynamite to photography), alternative sexualities, modern warfare, and economic crisis. Parkes's historicizing approach highlights various neglected and intriguing contexts for the works he discusses. Another strength of his book is that he does not rest content with formulaic New Historicist diagnoses of [End Page 296] modernism's "implication" in various historical developments, nor does he try to fit his object into a pre-defined ideological pigeonhole. Instead, Parkes is often scrupulous in teasing out the nature of the interaction between each text and context. In his analysis, impressionist texts variously compete with or subvert photography, criticize the modern mass media while at times acknowledging their own tendency to mediate experience for isolated readers, find uneasy bedfellows in the detonating devices of anarchist bombers and modern armies, and actively reflect on the blurred boundaries between those various forms of violence.

What counts as "context" here is sometimes as elusive as Impressionism itself. The book's cover features a 1906 photograph of a bomb outrage in Madrid that sheds new light on Conrad's The Secret Agent. The fact that media coverage of terrorism is as much part of our world as of Conrad's ensures that this qualifies as "context"; Ford's response to the Great Depression was probably chosen with similar contemporary parallels in mind. In other chapters, Parkes's "context" appears more rarefied and threatens to collapse back into a more purely aesthetic realm. Parkes offers a stimulating reading of The Portrait of a Lady against the backdrop of the court case that opposed Ruskin and Whistler—a dispute that is shown to be crucial to what James meant by "justice" in his novel. However highly publicized the quarrel was, and granting that it was a defining moment in the very redefinition of art's place in society, one may wonder whether James would have been equally inspired had the case not involved art at all. Parkes's chapter on James was initially published twelve years ago in Victorian Studies and has already been cited several times in the pages of the Henry James Review: the book's protracted genesis may also explain shifts in Parkes's working definition of "context," as 9/11 and the banking crisis uncannily shadowed his contextualization of modernist writing. Where the book remains most consistent is in its recurrent tracing of Pater's influence on a whole range of writers. Although that terrain has already been extensively charted in previous studies by Michael Levenson, Francis McGrath...

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