In his introduction to What Was Literary Impressionism? Michael Fried reveals that he has been in pursuit of an answer to his book’s titular question for more than thirty years. It is in part for this reason that so much of the book draws on Fried’s previous scholarship dating back to the late 1980s. From relatively early explorations into the role played by disfigured and upturned faces in the literature Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad to more recent examinations of monstrosity in H. G. Wells, portions of Fried’s previous scholarship find their way into the present book and significantly inform the contribution it seeks to make, underscoring Fried’s point, made early on in What Was Literary Impressionism?, that the path to publishing a “comprehensive (though by no means exhaustive) overview of English-language literary impressionism” had “lain open” to him for over a quarter century (23).
The result of Fried’s...
