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. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Literary Impressionism: Subjective and Objective Visions in Dorothy Richardson and Ford Madox Ford ‘The thing perceived and herself perceiving’: The double impression Realism, impressionism and Henry James Subjectivity and objectivity Representing the unrepresentable I: Total experience and the distracted subject in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End Representing the unrepresentable II: Masculine blindness and feminine angles of vision in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage Selection and patterning: The impressionist text as tapestry 2. Mystical Visions and Primary Perception: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson Naming the unnameable: Silence, mysticism, philosophy, religion Silence and Maeterlinck Mysticism, philosophy and the absolute ‘Breaking through the veil of sense’: God and reality 3. Visual Metaphors: Dorothy Richardson and H.D. Seeing through representation I: The world as art Seeing through representation II: The body as art The composite image: Fidelity through multiplicity Weaving Cinematic form Soporific cinema and the creative collaboration of art and audience Interlude: ‘To focus from a distance’: Solitude and coming to writing 4. Memory, Distance, Perspective Psychology and the novel- memoir: May Sinclair and Ford Madox Ford ‘Post- war Freudianity’: Trauma, repression and detachment ‘Disinterested contemplation’: Dorothy Richardson’s March Moonlight and the ‘middles’ Gallery spaces: Memory and metaphor in Richardson and H.D. Conclusion: ‘Proust and Proust and Proust. Forwards, Backwards, Upside Down’ Works Cited Index