LITERARY IMPRESSIONISM: CHARACTERISTICS AND REPRESENTATIVES - LITERATURE - 2025

The literary impressionism was a movement born at the end of the nineteenth century inspired by the influence of impressionist artists. His aim was to oppose the realistic literature that prevailed at that time.

Impressionist literature was characterized by focusing its attention on the mental life of the characters. This included the narration of their appreciations of reality, their feelings, their sensations and emotions.

Marcel proust

The Impressionists pursued the objective of presenting the portrayed stories from a subjective point of view of reality. To do this, they took a narrow selection of details that allowed them to transmit the sensory impressions that an incident or scene provoked in a character.

the beginning

The birth of literary impressionism is located in France thanks to the Goncourt brothers, who founded the first impressionist magazine in 1856 and published several novels of this genre.

Like other artistic movements, Impressionism was born in painting and was later transferred to literature.

Plastic impressionism was based on capturing images in a non-objective way, in which sensations were captured instead of realistic images.

Thanks to this precedent, Impressionist writers sought to achieve the same effect in the images that they captured in their poetic and dramaturgical works. For this reason, they sought to give greater value to the description of the sensitive effects.

characteristics

A fundamental characteristic of Impressionism is the tendency to describe the objects referred to in a detailed way. However, these descriptions were always subjective, depending on the impression they made on the characters.

For this reason, the descriptions found in Impressionist texts cannot be compared with those offered by dictionaries.

His objective was not to define reality precisely, but to capture its essence in the sensations they produce in people.

In this literature the senses come into contact with the imagination. This occurs since the situations are charged with emotional force that connect the reader with the stories through what the senses of the characters perceive: colors, smells and physical and emotional sensations.

The impressionists wanted to separate themselves from academic coldness and also from romantic sentimentality. Therefore, their themes were oriented to the emotional evocation of the details of daily life that they narrated using simple and direct terms.

Impressionism in its written form tended towards synesthesia. This means that its representatives sought to construct a form of expression that used the perceptions of all the senses and mixed them with each other. For example, they described visible objects through the narration of smells or textures.

Main representatives

The Goncourt brothers

Edmond Goncourt was born in 1822 and died in 1896. His brother Jules Goncourt was born in 1830 and died in 1870. They were two French writers recognized for being the founders and representatives of literary impressionism.

They enjoyed a good economic position that allowed them to dedicate themselves to art and literature. Initially they cultivated the historical genre and were particularly interested in 18th century France, especially in relation to the French Revolution.

Later they dabbled in literary criticism and later in the genre of the novel. His works were characterized by the description of daily life in Paris, which today constitutes a highly relevant literary and cultural legacy.

After the death of Jules in 1870, Edmund continued to dedicate himself to literature. Among the works of this period is one of those that most highlighted the author, entitled The Zemganno Brothers, published in 1879.

Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau was born in France in 1850 and passed away in 1917. He worked as a civil servant until he left office to pursue journalism. In his journalistic work, he stood out for his social criticism and his daring literary innovations.

He was a defender of the Impressionist painters, strongly criticized by the society of the time. Later he himself would approach this movement from writing.

He published a series of short stories entitled Lettres de ma chaumière and his first novel El Calvario in 1886. He also ventured into the theater with plays such as Business are business, translated into several languages.

His style was inclined towards strange and abnormal facts and characters, which he brought to the scene with a brutal naturalism that focused on all the details. This characteristic led him to capture even the cruelest sensations and capture them in a very sensitive way.

Marcel proust

Marcel Proust was born in France in July 1871 and died in the same country in 1922. He was one of the most prominent and influential French writers of the 20th century.

His works were influenced by impressionism and symbolism. This can be seen in the detail you give to the observations and descriptions of the objects. However, its greatest characteristic is the flow of consciousness.

His novels are characterized by being indirect monologues in which an omniscient narrator guides the reader through the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

Some of them have psychological manipulations of time: the narrator changes the time, place and perspective of the events.

Virginia Woolf

Adelina Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf, was born in London in 1882 and died in 1941. Her novels were particularly innovative in terms of the temporal and spatial structures of narration.

He perfected his style of interior monologue, in which the thoughts of the characters are presented naturally. In them the unconscious and unstructured flow of ideas is represented, which allowed him to balance the rational and irrational worlds.

Thanks to her novels Mrs. Dalloway and Heart of Darkness, she is considered one of the representatives of this current. These novels have been said to be the best examples of a genre that is difficult to explain and describe.

She was a pioneer in her time in reflecting on the social condition of women, as well as the relationship of women with art and literature.

These reflections were published in essays that would later have great repercussion within feminism.

References

1. Art & Popular Culture. (SF). Impressionism (literature). Recovered from: artandpopularculture.com
2. Gersh-Nesic, B. (2017). Art History Basics: Impressionism. Recovered from: thoughtco.com
3. New World Encyclopedia. (SF). Impressionism. Recovered from: newworldencyclopedia.org
4. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2017). Impressionism. Recovered from: britannica.com