Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900

Acknowledgments ix

Also by Daniel R. Schwarz xi

1 Introduction: The Novel After 1900 1

2 Cultural Crisis: Decadence and Desire in Mann's Death in Venice (1912) 13

3 Proust's Swann's Way (1913) and the Novel of Sensibility: Memory, Obsession, and Consciousness 34

4 The Metamorphosis (1915): Kaf ka's Noir Challenge to Realism 59

5 Camus's Indifferent, Amoral, and Godless Cosmos: The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) as Existential Novels 77

6 Why Giorgio Bassani Matters: The Elegiac Imagined World of Bassani and the Jews of Ferrara 109

7 The Novel as Elegy: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) 126

8 Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959): Reconfiguring European History as Fable 144

9 Imre Kertész's Fatelessness (1975): Rendering the Holocaust as a Present Tense Event 176

10 Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984): History as Fate 197

11 Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989): Rewriting History, Reconfiguring Lives 223

12 Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (1998): Cultural Conflict in Sixteenth ]Century Istanbul and its Modern Implications 242

13 Herta Müller's The Hunger Angel (2009): A Hunger for Life, A Hunger for Words 265

14 Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet: Women Discovering Their Voices in a Violent and Sexist Male Society 286

Selected Bibliography (Including Works Cited) 327

Index 334

"For over four decades, Daniel R. Schwarz has taught generations of students in the Cornell classroom and countless teachers through his thorough and yet accessible scholarship how to approach British Modernism from historical, psychological, and aesthetic perspectives. In recent years, Schwarz has turned his attention to a variety of other 20th Century topics including painting, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the Holocaust, urban culture, and The New York Times. Now, in the first of a two volume study on Reading the European Novel to 1900, Schwarz extends his scope once more, this time moving back in time and across a continent to offer sensitive, well-informed close readings of classic novels from Cervantes in 17th Century Spain, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in 19th Century France, and Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky in 19th Century Russia. His focus is on the genre's greatest examples from a time when the realist novel reached its apex even as it included folklore, fantasy, and magical realist elements on the cusp of the form's transition into modernist experimentalism and psychological exploration. Schwarz's study is chock full of judicious evaluation of characters, narratives 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."
--David Morris, Purdue University

Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. In 1998 he received Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences Russell Award for Distinguished Teaching. Considered one of the world's leading authorities on James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Modernism, his most recent books are How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning and Reading the European Novel to 1900.

D. R. Schwarz, Cornell University