Shadowtime

the long version

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.