ABSTRACT
Literary Impressionism developed at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in France and England, and derived its label from the one applied to French painters such as Claude Monet. In the search for a spontaneous, unmediated presentation of experience, the protagonists of Ford Madox Ford's novels like Dowell in The Good Soldier or Henry in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh and the author himself in works of autobiographical reminiscences. An investigation of the relationship in Ford's main novels between his literary techniques and painting, music, sculpture, visual technologies and forms of popular entertainment, see Laura Colombino, Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing. Further pictorial influences can be inferred from the analysis of his main narrative techniques, to which we are now moving. Ford's theoretical and critical discussions of the art of the novel are grounded in relativism and suspicious of stable, unswerving assertions as to the truth to be achieved through the writing of fiction.
