Reading the Times

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 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