Literary Impressionisms. Resonances of Impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish Prose 1880-1900.

This dissertation aims to locate and draw out resonances of impressionism in Swedish and Finland-Swedish prose at the end of the nineteenth century, a field hitherto overlooked in the critical debate on literary impressionism. Through the initial examination of the use of the term in an international context comprising the Scandinavian scene, the aim is to show the many alternative accesses to literary impressionism. By focusing on three landmark discussions on the theme in the Nordic countries of the late nineteenth-century (Herman Bang, the Kristiania Bohème, August Strindberg) the inclusive, wide-ranging Scandinavian understanding of the relationship between impressionism and literature is introduced. Accordingly, the texts thereafter chosen for closer scrutiny are intended to disclose this extensive interpretation of impressionist writing: Helena Westermarck’s short story Aftonstämning (Evening Mood) from 1890 is read as an example of interart transposition, i.e., as a piece of prose adopting a theme, as well as the compositional aesthetics, of painterly impressionism; Stella Kleve’s novels and short stories are instead seen as indicative of the narrative modes of a literary impressionism drawing on theatrical representation, as in Bang’s impressionist poetics, but also present textual features such as the ‘metonymic mode’ and ‘delayed decoding’, elements central to the international approach to impressionist prose. The concluding analysis of fictional impressionists in the prose of authors such as Gustaf af Geijerstam, Mathilda Roos, and Georg Nordensvan advances a many-sided portrait of the impressionist painter while remaining true to this study’s pluralistic approach to literary impressionism by including a discussion of K. A. Tavaststjerna’s Impressionisten (The Impressionist) from 1892, whose protagonist is not an artist but a hypersensitive, impressionable subject. This last section also investigates how fiction is used to convey a critical discussion of the means and methods of painterly impressionism, as well as the function of the use of the visual arts in the texts.