Reading the Times Temporality and History in Twentieth-century Fiction.

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

History in literature.

Physical Description:

ix, 262 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] : Edinburgh Univ Pr, 2018.

Summary:

A wide-ranging study of shifting temporalities and their literacy consequences in twentieth-century fiction, From the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf to the novels of William Gibson and W. G. Sebald, Reading the Times offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history's passage, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining their development and demonstrating - through incisive analyses of a very wide range of literary texts from late nineteenth to early twenty-first century - their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history - in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Picnic, Time, Prime Time, Story Time 1

2 'All Those Figures': Joseph Conrad and the Maritimes 27

3 'Wheels within Wheels': D. H. Lawrence, Industrial Time and War Time 47

4 Times in the Mind: Modernism in the 1920s 73

5 Not Like Old Times: The 1930s to Mid-Century 124

6 'Time is Over': Postmodern Times 160

7 Conclusion: Millennial Times, Perennial Times 220.

ISBN:

9781474401555

1474401554

OCLC:

1000584853