Introduction: Impression(s)

International audienceThis is the introduction to the volume "Impression(s)". The articles presented in this cluster discuss literary and visual impressions from the premise that literary impressionism and printmaking share the trope of impression as “impress” and as “imprints” in a technical and epistemological sense. Most works on Impressionism and literary impressionism dwell on the genealogy and mutual influence of fiction and painting, but few authors tackle the importance of printmaking. The five essays presented here all examine impressions as theme, trope and technique in 19th and 20th-century texts and images. These essays discuss intermedial practices, the mutual influence of artistic practice and textual production, as well as the dual meaning of impression as a mode of reception and of expression by exploring the relationship between art criticism, literary impressionism, illustration, and printmaking from the late 19th century to the 1920s in Britain. They address how the shift from late-Victorian aesthetics to modernist experimentation was negotiated in these fields according to an inclusive view of print culture. They sugges tthat the aesthetic foregrounding and polysemic use of impressions paved the way for the transition from late nineteenth-century aesthetics to the modernist period