An exploration of the modern European novel from a renowned English literature scholar Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 is an engaging, in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern European novel. Written in Daniel R. Schwarz's precise and highly readable style, this critical study offers compelling discussions on a wide range of major works since 1900 and examines recurring themes within the context of significant historical events, including both World Wars and the Holocaust. The author cites important developments in the evolution of the modern novel and explores how these paradigmatic works of fiction reflect intellectual and cultural history, including developments in painting and cinema. Schwarz focuses on narrative complexity, thematic subtlety, and formal originality as well as how novels render historical events and cultural developments Discussing major works by Proust, Camus, Mann, Kafka, Grass, di Lampedusa, Bassani, Kertesz, Pamuk, Kundera, Saramago, Muller and Ferrante, Schwarz explores how these often experimental masterworks pay homage to the their major predecessors—discussed in Schwarz's ground-breaking Reading the European Novel to 1900—even while proposing radical departures from realism in their approach to time and space, their testing the limits of language, and their innovative ways of rendering the human psyche. Written for teachers and students by a highly-acclaimed scholar and including valuable study questions, Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 offers a guide for a deeper understanding of how these original modern masters respond to both the past and present.

An exploration of the modern European novel from a renowned English literature scholar Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 is an engaging, in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern European novel. Written in Daniel R. Schwarz’s precise and highly readable style, this critical study offers compelling discussions on a wide range of major works since 1900 and examines recurring themes within the context of significant historical events, including both World Wars and the Holocaust. The author cites important developments in the evolution of the modern novel and explores how these paradigmatic works of fiction reflect intellectual and cultural history, including developments in painting and cinema. Schwarz focuses on narrative complexity, thematic subtlety, and formal originality as well as how novels render historical events and cultural developments Discussing major works by Proust, Camus, Mann, Kafka, Grass, di Lampedusa, Bassani, Kertesz, Pamuk, Kundera, Saramago, Muller and Ferrante, Schwarz explores how these often experimental masterworks pay homage to the their major predecessors--discussed in Schwarz’s ground-breaking Reading the European Novel to 1900--even while proposing radical departures from realism in their approach to time and space, their testing the limits of language, and their innovative ways of rendering the human psyche. Written for teachers and students by a highly-acclaimed scholar and including valuable study questions, Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 offers a guide for a deeper understanding of how these original modern masters respond to both the past and present.

An exploration of the modern European novel from a renowned English literature scholar Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 is an engaging, in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern European novel. Written in Daniel R. Schwarz's precise and highly readable style, this critical study offers compelling discussions on a wide range of major works since 1900 and examines recurring themes within the context of significant historical events, including both World Wars and the Holocaust. The author cites important developments in the evolution of the modern novel and explores how these paradigmatic works of fiction reflect intellectual and cultural history, including developments in painting and cinema. Schwarz focuses on narrative complexity, thematic subtlety, and formal originality as well as how novels render historical events and cultural developments Discussing major works by Proust, Camus, Mann, Kafka, Grass, di Lampedusa, Bassani, Kertesz, Pamuk, Kundera, Saramago, Muller and Ferrante, Schwarz explores how these often experimental masterworks pay homage to the their major predecessors—discussed in Schwarz's ground-breaking Reading the European Novel to 1900—even while proposing radical departures from realism in their approach to time and space, their testing the limits of language, and their innovative ways of rendering the human psyche. Written for teachers and students by a highly-acclaimed scholar and including valuable study questions, Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 offers a guide for a deeper understanding of how these original modern masters respond to both the past and present.

"Schwarz's study is chock full of judicious evaluation of characters, narrative devices, ethical commentary, and helpful information about historical and political contexts including the role of Napoleon, the rise of capitalism, trains, class divisions, transformation of rural life, and the struggle to define human values in a period characterized by debates between and among rationalism, spiritualism, and determinism. One experiences the pleasure of watching a master critic as he re-reads, savors, and passes on his hard-won wisdom about how we as humans read and why. Daniel Morris, Professor of English, Purdue University Written by one of literature's most esteemed scholars and critics, Reading the European Novel to 1900 is an engaging and in-depth examination of major works of the European novel from Cervantes' Don Quixote to Zola's Germinal. In Daniel R. Schwarz's inimitable style, which balances formal and historical criticism in precise, readable prose, this book offers close readings of individual texts with attention to each one's cultural and canonical context. Major texts that he discusses: Cervantes' Don Quixote; Stendhal's The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma; Balzac's Père Goriot; Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education; Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov; Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina; and Zola's Germinal. Schwarz examines the history and evolution of the novel during this period and defines each author's aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical significance. Incorporating important pedagogical suggestions and the latest research, this text provides accessible and lucid discussion of the European novel to 1900 for students, teachers, and general readers interested in the evolution of the novelistic form.

A groundbreaking study in literary geography. An Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 explores the fascinating connections between literature and space. In this pioneering study, Franco Moretti presents a fresh and exciting perspective en the European novel. In a series of one hundred maps, Moretti illuminates the geographical assumptions of nineteenth-century novels and the geographical reach of particular authors and genres across the continent. A good map, he discovers, can be worth a thousand words in posing new questions and allowing us to see connections that have so tar escaped us. Reading his Atlas, we become aware of the secret structure of Dickens's and Conan Doyle's London, and see how the fictional settings of Austen's Britain, or picaresque Spain, or the France of the Comedie humaine imagine national identity in different ways. In a final chapter on "narrative markets," Moretti tells us which books were most popular in the provincial libraries of Victorian Britain, and charts the European diffusion of Don Quixote, Buddenbrooks, and the great nineteenth-century bestsellers. In Franco Moretti's Atlas, maps are net ornaments, but analytical tools which, in making connections explicit and visible, allow us to 'see' literature in a completely new way. This path-breaking study suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.