This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

The arts were loosely defined by a plethora of ‘-isms’ in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. None is more often associated with Debussy than Impressionism. Even recent scholarship is still disposed to position him as an Impressionist composer. Whilst much work has been done to disentangle Debussy from the tag and align him in relation to, among others, Hellenistic paintings (around the time of the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune [it.]), Symbolist painting, and the English Pre-Raphaelites, it is important to understand what has been intended by the term ‘musical Impressionism’, how it came to be associated with Debussy, and his usually hostile response to being thus categorised.

Since the early 1880s, Paris had become a place where it was possible to be ‘modern’. In the arts, by Modernism we mean a vast movement based on the concept of modernity appealing to the notions of evolution, progress, independence, freedom, and also resistance to certain social and economic change. Modernism in art in the broadest sense will constantly evolve and take many forms. Thus, if Symbolism and Impressionism dominated the Debussyan sphere, many other movements marked the period (1880–1914) and they aroused varied reactions on the composer’s part, ranging from the sincerest interest to the most pronounced rejection. To be interested in Modernism in the world of Debussy is therefore to be as interested in Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Naturalism, and even in Futurism. Art Nouveau (Modern Style) is given its due in this broad context. Debussy was particularly sensitive to the style and possessed a magnificent Art Nouveau lamp by the English firm Benson & Co., which he probably bought at the Siegfried Bing gallery Maison de l’Art Nouveau (Bing was a great proponent of Art Nouveau).

Just as singing was the foundation of Amy Beach’s musical world, songs formed the backbone for her composing. It was through songwriting that she won her initial fame as a composer, and for which she was best remembered for decades after her death. She composed songs prolifically throughout her career, producing 121 art songs. They predominate her total compositional output, often serving as a proving ground for larger works. They demonstrate her intimacy with the texts she chose to set, mastery of the form, and awareness of trends in current European musical styles. Insightful interpretation of poetic material and a keen awareness of languages’ natural inflections led to creation of melodies that flow as easily as the spoken word. This characteristic sets her songs apart from those of her peers and makes her songs accessible to both amateur and professional musicians. Recent rediscovery of Beach’s songs is due in large part to copyright expirations, making the majority of her songs readily available on the internet.

After revisiting Bohm’s implicate and expliocate orders, the chapter looks into the kinship between the implicate order and both Bergsonian duration and the continuity of the reading consciousness. Articulation and form also particpate intimately in ongoing duration. But what is the nature of the time of reading and how do we apprehend it? The chapter goes on to examine and criticize Bergson’s cinematographic account of language perceived as movement. Bergsonian duration and the dynamic of translation are compared with Impressionist painting. The chapter then moves on to consider the part played by voice and rhythm in the realization of duration and of intuitional relationships with text. It finally sets itself the task of identifying a rhythm pecular to translational activity itself. The chapter includes, as illustrations, translations from Eluard, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle.

Conrad eloquently wrote about his inability to write; he stuttered his way through his texts with nonlexical grunts, snarls, howls, murmurs, gurgles, snorts and hems; and he sought to stay true to “the stammerings of his conscience” (xliii), a working method alluded to in the Preface of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). In this chapter, I argue that distraction – usually a writer’s enemy – is another one of these unexpected features that Conrad used to propel his writing; his seemingly rambling digressions are part of a quest for verbal precision. Although he is frequently conceived of as a methodical and philosophical writer, distraction was a fundamental and serious part of his literary enterprise. By allowing distraction, inattentiveness and absent-mindedness to become part of his fiction, he was able to stay productive, steal the reader’s attention and add a level of everyday realism to his texts. Conrad, I maintain, writes in medias distractionis and consistently pays attention to those who do not pay attention.

In 1906, under the guiding editorial hand of William Roughead, a new series of books appeared under the title Notable Trials. These tremendously popular volumes capitalised on a burgeoning fascination with the criminal trial and a focus upon the courtroom, in place of the scaffold, as the ultimate symbol of the justice system. While many of the early volumes dealt with historically significant trials, by 1920 attention was very much directed towards what would dominate the series as it developed in the ensuing decades until its demise in the 1950s: namely, the contemporary trial marked by some element of personal interest. The Notable Trials are an early example of what would now be called ‘true crime’: a form which trades on reality as cachet. Yet the series also tended to publish accounts of trials in which the verdict was in some way doubtful. This chapter argues that the conceptualisation of realist narrative as potentially faulty, which underpinned the success of Notable Trials, also shaped the development of literature in the period, and in particular the various forms of doubt and uncertainty which characterise the fiction of literary impressionism.

This chapter examines the relationship between literature and visual cultures between 1900 and 1920 through the different forms of art writing practised by a range of literary and cultural figures. Museums and art galleries witnessed a surge in popularity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as collections expanded and opened up to a wider viewing public, while exhibitions such as the post-impressionist exhibition of 1910 have come to be seen as cultural landmarks in narratives of the period. This essay explores writers’ encounters with artworks and artefacts in the contested yet stimulating spaces of museums and galleries, and examines the ways in which such encounters helped to frame questions about aesthetics and cultural identity, history and the contemporaneous. It takes in the role of periodical cultures – focusing on Rhythm (1911–13), Blast (1914–15), and Colour Magazine (1914–32) – in mediating responses to visual art and as sites in which the demarcations between word and image could be redefined.

One of Ford’s heart patients in The Good Soldier (1915), a Mr Hurlbird, has a habit of handing out ‘cool California oranges’ to everyone he meets. Ford offers little explanation for this behaviour beyond the clue that Hurlbird is a ‘violent Democrat’ – a phrase that would perhaps have conjured in the minds of contemporary readers the endeavours of William Jennings Bryan and other economic pragmatists to introduce a version of what we would now call ‘quantitative easing’: namely, an agreement from the US central bank to print money according to demand. This chapter proposes that British attitudes towards monetary value in the first two decades of the twentieth century were beginning to give way to the influence of American pragmatists like Bryan. Keynes writes in an essay of 1923: ‘The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914 have been on a scale so great as to constitute … one of the most significant events in the economic history of the world.’ Monetary value was beginning to change its character from a non-negotiable essence to an instrument of policy. This chapter traces the imprint of this incipient British economic pragmatism in the work of Keynes, Conrad, and Ford.

This chapter reassesses the relationship between the Gothic and the cinematic experience within the silent cinema era. At its birth in 1895, the very medium of cinema itself was perceived as inherently Gothic. Maxim Gorky’s famous allusion to a ‘kingdom of shadows’ full of grey, silent figures that filled him with ‘breathless horror’ evoked the spectre of the uncanny that underpins the Gothic experience. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that if one examines the history of the Gothic in the silent era, the Gothic changes from being an intrinsic part of the cinema experience to becoming a series of narrative and stylistic elements that ultimately form part of a kind of proto-horror, a mise-en-scène in search of a genre. By focusing not upon story elements but rather upon the ongoing association between the Gothic and the cinematographic through the use of cinematic techniques to convey subjective states of being, this chapter examines how the Gothic potential of the cinematic experience that was fundamental to the era of cinema’s birth did not disappear but rather remained, and continues to remain, embedded within cinema itself.

It is no surprise that Fauré has never been associated with orientalism or exotic musics. Aside from a few paragraphs by Sylvain Caron, no one has ventured to write a study of Fauré and orientalism.1 Indeed, it almost seems as if the composer himself ordained this dissociation for his own legacy. His final two song cycles, Mirages, Op. 113, and L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, bring the point home. The titles of both works evoke faraway geographies. But the first song of Mirages, “Cygne sur l’eau,” works in the opposite direction: the itinerary reaches inward.

Affective states and their representational forms have been as crucial to critical constructions of modernism as to the writing we associate with its multiple movements, moments, and legacies. At the confluence of represented feeling and registrations of affect, ambitions of otherwise historically distinct writers come into conversation. To see how this conversation might enhance modernist studies’ critical-affective literacies, this chapter follows a transhistorical rather than a discretely periodized arc, gauging the conceptual challenges and interpretive opportunities that come with close reading affective representation as it interlaces modernism’s stylistic aspirations and political valences. It considers how changing disciplinary priorities are transforming the ways in which modernist studies addresses affect’s critical purchase. And it encompasses both early twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures (Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Storm Jameson, Ian McEwan, and Rachael Cusk) to explore analytical synergies between vocabularies of feeling and evolving strategies of experimental form.

This chapter turns to the city as imagined in literary impressionism from the early twentieth century, reflecting on the spectral, ethereal landscape of Singapore as it appears in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s writing, the neoclassical buildings housing the banks and corporations appear superimposed, rendering Singapore’s grand and solid modernity strangely superficial and insubstantial. As scholars have argued, this works to unsettle the city’s colonial identity as a triumph of modernity and order over primeval jungle, making Conrad’s Singapore an archetypal ‘unreal city’ and a crucial location for the development of urban impressionism. This chapter shows how Conrad not only stages the breakdown of colonial progress but also engages critically with the British laissez-faire discourses framing the city’s foundational identity as a free port. In this way, a connection opens up between his experiments with narrative agency and the city’s own colonial identity as the product of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces.

We explain, and illustrate with examples drawn from our own work, how interpretive researchers analyse comparative data. We argue that a comparative project compounds the uncertainty, confusion and paralysis that can set in when confronted with a 'mountain' of qualitative data. We argue it is not possible to 'somehow capture' this full complexity. We outline and defend the need for a consciously impressionistic orientation to data analysis. Rather than searching for a ‘Eureka!’ moment that confirms or refutes a narrow theory (in naturalist mode) or makes sense of the whole picture (in idiographic mode), a comparative focus on dilemmas enables the use of a kaleidoscope of different analytical lenses and tools to explore complex specificness in context. We outline rules of thumb for helping along the way.