Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative

This acclaimed study explores how the common denominators of modernity, neutral time and neutral space, were constructed from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. Central to this development was the normalizing of a certain grammar of perspective evident across a range of practices from art to politics, from science to philosophy, from mathematics to cartography. In particular, it deals with the construction of historical time in narrative from the 18th and 19th centuries, with case studies of Defoe, Richardson, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James.