1. What is in a word?

«What exactly is meant by ‘impressionism’ in fiction?» is one of the questions raised by Marianna Torgovnick in a scathing commentary on Mario Praz’s concluding words to his essay Mnemosyne: the Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Torgovnick 1985: 6). With this, and a host of other queries, Torgovnick is phrasing her perplexity when confronted with Praz’s view on interart analogies relying on the idea of a vague and general Zeitgeist. Torgovnick’s wording is only apparently simpl.