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

by Randall Stevenson (Author)

Academics, postgraduates, upper level undergraduates in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Novel, Modern Fiction, Narrative Theory / Narratology, Literary Criticism.

Front Jacket

*APPROVED* 'Think there's nothing left to be said about time in the twentieth-century novel? Read Randall Stevenson's Reading the Times, and think again. Stevenson gives us a new history of narrative form that is at the same time a compact cultural history of the century.' Brian McHale, The Ohio State University A wide-ranging study of shifting temporalities and their literary 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. Randall Stevenson is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Literature and the Great War (2013), The Last of England?: The Oxford English Literary History vol.12, 1960-2000 (2004) and Modernist Fiction (1998). Cover image: the clock in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, formerly the Gare d'Orsay (c) Shutterstock.com Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk

Author Biography

Randall Stevenson is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Born in the north of Scotland, grew up in Glasgow and studied in the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. Lectured on modern literature in 15 countries in Europe and in Nigeria, South Korea and Egypt. General Editor of the Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain series.