Publisher's Synopsis
This study focuses on literary modernism's representational effects. I show how the works of Mallarmé, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka share in a historical genealogy with impressionism, a representational history which draws significantly from naturalism's challenge to realism. Ann Banfield demonstrates how a compelling historical genealogy exists linking the literary modernism of authors like Joyce and Woolf to 19th-century French impressionism, as well as naturalism.1 When Impressionist paintings were first exhibited in Paris, Hope Kingsley tells us, the word "impression" itself was used first "in Louis Leroy's satirical 1874 review," [but] Émile Zola referred to the painters as "'naturalistes, ' and quite correctly, for the tenets of impressionism overlapped with naturalism and realism
