Introduction

“It seems very pretty,” she said […], “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!” L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) 1. On the usefulness of locating impressionism in swedish prose There are cultural contexts within which impressionism is acknowledged as a significant literary tend.