‘Insane Thinking’: The Impressionism of Arthur Symons

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-147
Author(s):  
Robert Harris
Keyword(s):  
Causal Link ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Nervous Breakdown

This article explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

Things Said by the Way

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 241-257
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Walter Pater (1839–1894) saw the essay as the quintessentially modern literary form: a dialectic of philosophy and poetry, yoking together the precious and the commonplace, capable of embodying the scepticism and relativism of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the literary essay was for him a rich source of experimentation in his own writing. In his critical works Pater explored the genealogy and features of essayistic style in a highly self-conscious way, tracing a history of the genre that goes from the Platonic dialogues to Montaigne, while his historical novels are punctuated with a series of digressions that gives them a distinctly hybrid, essayistic quality. In Gaston de Latour, Pater even stages an encounter between his fictional protagonist and Montaigne, in which he brings into focus his theory of the essay as revealing the importance of things found ‘at some random turn by the way’.

Translational Decadence: Versions of Gustave Flaubert, Walter Pater, and Lafcadio Hearn

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 807-829
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Material History ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of

Literary decadence played an active role in promoting the increased circulation and critical scrutiny of literary translations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Building on Walter Benjamin's influential definition of translation as an autonomous literary form, this article examines Walter Pater's “Style” (1888) and Lafcadio Hearn's 1910 translation of Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) in order to map a theory and practice of decadent translation founded on the aesthetic and ethical respect for the foreignness of the original. Paying closer attention to the aesthetics of decadent translation, as well as its social networks and material history, generates new insights on the cosmopolitan culture of decadence and Victorian literature more broadly.

The Works of Walter Pater

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Pater
Keyword(s):  
Walter Pater

The Works of Walter Pater

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Pater
Keyword(s):  
Walter Pater

Walter Pater: Personality and Persons

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-250
Author(s):  
Stephen Cheeke
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Self ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Of Persons

This article argues for the centrality of notions of personality and persons in the work of Walter Pater and asks how this fits in with his critical reception. Pater's writing is grounded in ideas of personality and persons, of personification, of personal gods and personalised history, of contending voices, and of the possibility of an interior conversation with the logos. Artworks move us as personalities do in life; the principle epistemological analogy is with the knowledge of persons – indeed, ideas are only grasped through the form they take in the individuals in whom they are manifested. The conscience is outwardly embodied in other persons, but also experienced as a conversation with a person inhabiting the most intimate and sovereign dimension of the self. Even when personality is conceived as the walls of a prison-house, it remains a powerful force, able to modify others. This article explores the ways in which these questions are ultimately connected to the paradoxes of Pater's own person and personality, and to the matter of his ‘style’.

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