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“And new philosophy calls all in doubt,” wrote John Donne of the effect of science on the 17th-century world-view, “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” The same might be said for the notion of the self in Judith Ryan's thorough study of the complex relations between 19th-century psychology and literature, in which previously stable and reassuring ideas of the self were called into question by the development of empiricist and impressionist thought. Stating that one of the aims of her book is “to view modernism afresh through the eyes of empiricism” (p. 22), Ryan asks, “What did it mean to be an empiricist in the late 19th century? Primarily, it meant that the only admissible evidence for the existence of something was that of our senses… [T]here was no separate ‘object-world’: everything that was, subsisted in consciousness itself” (p. 2). Concerned primarily to show “the implications of the new psychologies [of the 1870s and 1880s] for literary texts” (p. 225), Ryan usefully explores much-less-traveled ground in literary history, deliberately downplaying the influence of Freudian thought in favor of showing how empiricist psychology was in dialogue with modernist (late 19th- and early 20th-century) writers and artists. Throughout, Ryan highlights parallels between literature and the visual arts of the period, including impressionism, pointillism, divisionism, and cubism.
Her study covers 15 writers whose works are read as responses to the newly emerging philosophies of consciousness and subjectivity. In her opening historical overview, Ryan argues that the chief influences