The movement

• Impressionism ranges from around 1895 to the year 1925.
• It came about as a reaction to Realism which focused so strongly on lessons of morality and deep description, it also substituted Realism’s objectivity for more personal experiences.

Characteristics

• Impressionism is characterised by provoking the senses, it creates vivid imagery through words, to capture the fleeting aspects of an experience which cannot be repeated.
• It concentrates on how the world appears to the observer (subjectivity), focusing on individual moments and feelings.
• The plot usually consists of an experience portrayed through characters but no moral lesson is necessarily provided.
• It often depicts ordinary daily occurrences and then tries to show the beauty of them in life.
• Impressionism, as most other movements from around this time, depicted the changes made by urbanisation and industrialisation.

Writing style

• It does not use linear narrative, meaning that temporal and sequenital order are no longer a given.
• Fragmentation is used, which shows pieces of chosen information to the reader, and then they must form the overall picture.
• A stream of consciousness was used as a narrative device to show a character’s flow of thoughts and feelings.