Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-Century Fiction

A wide-ranging study of shifting temporalities and their literary consequences in twentieth-century fictionFrom the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad 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 the 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.Key FeaturesProvides a detailed history of the role of the clock and temporality in twentieth-century lifeIncludes incisive analyses of this role’s shaping of literary imagination traced in a very broad range of twentieth-century novelsProvides a unique, highly original literary history of the period’s fiction