Title: Shadowtime
Description: Boldly taking up Adorno's assertion that the crisis of twentieth-century art is its inability to represent historical events, Jim Reilly seeks the nineteenth-century roots of this problem and its articulation within the works of Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot. Drawing on the theories of Benjamin, Foucault, Hegel, Lukacs and Nietzsche he constructs a powerful argument across the entire period of historicism's triumph and decline. An outstanding combination of original readings and an indispensable survey, Shadowtime considers nineteenth-century literature in the light of current radical historiography. It poses critical questions about literature's relation to all the cherished principles of historicism: origination, antiquity, historical reconstruction, gender, possession and the very concept of the Real. A major study of realism, modernism and the complex relations of history and aesthetics in the modern period.
Subjects: English Historical fiction, English fiction, History, History and criticism, Knowledge, Literature and history, Mimesis in literature, Geschiedschrijving, Letterkunde, Geschichtsdarstellung, Mimesis, Geschichte, Eliot, george, 1819-1880, Hardy, thomas, 1840-1928, Conrad, joseph, 1857-1924, Knowledge and learning
People: George Eliot (1819-1880), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Time periods: 19th century