Lasting Impressions

Jesse Matz is the William P. Rice Professor of English and Literature at Kenyon College. He is the author of The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (2003) and Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (2001).

Lasting Impressions shrewdly explores a fascinating, strikingly under-researched topic, namely that impressionism remains a powerful cultural presence in ways that have tended to elude definition. Examining a variety of areas such as advertising, painting, music, and postcolonial and contemporary fiction, Jesse Matz argues that impressionism's seminal configuration of the project of modern representation has continued to shape cultural discourses and practices long after modernism. An extremely interesting and important work. -- Max Saunders, King's College London Lasting Impressions revitalizes our understanding of impressionism by showing just how strong its legacies are. Ranging widely across painting, music, narrative, and film, Matz argues in eloquent readings that in opening a gap between the authority of our perceptions and the stories we construct from them, impressionism leads to the most vibrant and intractable aesthetic problems we inherit today. This book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the unstable divide between art and its co-optation, high culture and kitsch, real experience and artistic fraud. -- Tamar Katz, author of Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England Brilliant and original in its arguments, impressive in its range and command of reference, and written in an invigorating style, Lasting Impressions will be essential reading for anyone interested in impressionism, the modernist movement in the arts, and the wider question of how modern culture has imagined and reimagined the status of art and the aesthetic. Every chapter is full of rewarding insights and provocative, challenging ideas. -- Adam Parkes, University of Georgia Written with the same elegance that characterizes its enduring subject, Lasting Impressions moves nimbly across time to uncover the indomitable energy with which impressionism informs new critical and transmedial configurations. By revealing how the perceptual problem of the impression continues to inspire charismatic narratives of cultural and aesthetic emergence, Jesse Matz deftly shows that impressionism remains a living mode of reflection on the very possibilities of contemporary art and literature. -- David James, Queen Mary, University of London and author of Modernist Futures Lasting Impressions poses two elemental questions: what makes art relevant, and how do we know things? Matz answers these questions in this landmark study, which traces the cultural contradictions surrounding impressionism from its origins in the nineteenth century to its manifestations in the twenty-first century. Matz's capacious aesthetic history, his second study of impressionism, will be essential for scholars seeking to understand modernism's multiple legacies. -- Urmila Seshagiri, author of Race and the Modernist Imagination

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. First and Lasting: Histories for the Tache 2. The Impressionist Advertisement 3. Photogenie from Renoir to Gance to Renoir 4. The "Image of Africa" from Conrad to Achebe to Adichie 5. Impressionist Fraud: Klein, Saito, Frey 6. Contemporary Impressions and Kitsch Aesthetics: Kinkade/Doig 7. The Pseudo-Impressionist Novel: Sebald, Toibin, Cunningham 8. Thinking Medium: The Rhetoric of Popular Cognition Conclusion Notes Index