Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford.

This essay discusses the impressionist remodeling of modernism around the turn of the nineteenth century by litterateurs Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer. There has been a collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Hueffer, which has been otherwise neglected, between 1898 and 1908. It was during these years in which many of Conrad's most well-known works appeared. Hueffer says that it was through their collaboration that a shared "impressionist" aesthetic was evolved. According to Hueffer, impressionism is a reaction to the internal plight of modernity caused by urbanization and by the various technological and social changes that accompany it.