Overview

The Pace of Fiction redefines the literary history of the novel by analyzing its most elaborate feature: its pace. It moves from the rise of the novel to realism and modernism. It starts by tracing the evolution of two narrative units: scenes (""shown"" slowly) and summaries (""told"" swiftly). These units emerge from the conflict of epic and drama, gain shape in the commentaries of Fielding and Goethe, and become dynamically opposed in nineteenth-century realism. In Middlemarch, they rotate in regular sequence: summaries move swiftly until scenes slow them down; scenes play out dramatically until summaries sweep them forward; their movement imitates the conflict of fate and free will. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, scenic impulses overtake summary storytelling. The reader sees the tendency already in Austen's dialogues, Hawthorne's tableaux, or Balzac's battering drama, and finds it in Jane Eyre's placement of summaries in private scenes. When Flaubert extends scenic vividness to all of his summaries, and when Henry James subordinates his summaries to scenic consciousness, the extreme pressure of scene upon summary brings the opposition of realist pacing to collapse. But other oppositions arise in the modernisms that follow. In the alternation of stasis and kinesis, of drifting thoughts and everyday actions, of stories and acts of storytelling--in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Hemingway--pace gathers and creates meaning in new ways.

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9780198858287

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Reviews

...offering a compelling genealogy of the English-American-French-German novel driven by the narrative interplay of scene and summary as its forward-propelling motor. * Adrian Renner, Universitat Hamburg, Arcadia *

The Pace of Fiction is a remarkable book that seems productively not of its moment — at times lingering in a world that seems to have long been superseded in the literary-critical profession, at others one or two steps in advance of that profession. It is thoroughly engaging and restlessly intelligent, and it offers a new way to think about some of the deepest, if also some of the most occluded and unaddressed, questions in the history of novelistic form. * Nicholas J. Dames, Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities, Columbia University * ...offering a compelling genealogy of the English-American-French-German novel driven by the narrative interplay of scene and summary as its forward-propelling motor. * Adrian Renner, Universität Hamburg, Arcadia *

"The Pace of Fiction is a remarkable book that seems productively not of its moment DL at times lingering in a world that seems to have long been superseded in the literary-critical profession, at others one or two steps in advance of that profession. It is thoroughly engaging and restlessly intelligent, and it offers a new way to think about some of the deepest, if also some of the most occluded and unaddressed, questions in the history of novelistic form. * Nicholas J. Dames, Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities, Columbia University * ...offering a compelling genealogy of the English-American-French-German novel driven by the narrative interplay of scene and summary as its forward-propelling motor. * Adrian Renner, Universit""at Hamburg, Arcadia * I recommend it to those invested in narratology and close reading in general and specifically to those who wish to delve into ways narrative pacing has come to be measured and transformed throughout literary history. * Ceren KuÅdemir Ãzbilek, YaÅar University *"

Author Information

Brian Gingrich is Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. His research ranges across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on the novel, modernism, and cinema.

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