Focusing on the work of Hardy, Lawrence, Conrad, Joyce, Forster and Woolf, this study is divided into two sections: the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings; the second discusses how new theory has transformed the way we read and think.

In an exciting and important book... The theoretical chapters are a model of elegantly styled accommodation; yet they brook no fudging of the issues, no comfortable ambiguities - Modern Fiction Studies The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930: Studies in Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Forster and Woolf is a provocative exploration of a crucial period in the development of the English novel, integrating critical theory, historical background and sophisticated close reading. Divided into two major sections, the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings. The second section is theoretical and speaks of the transformation in the way that we read and think about authors, readers, characters and form in the light of recent theory, offering an alternative to the deconstructive and Marxist trends in literary studies.

In an exciting and important book... The theoretical chapters are a model of elegantly styled accommodation; yet they brook no fudging of the issues, no comfortable ambiguities - Modern Fiction Studies The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890-1930: Studies in Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Forster and Woolf is a provocative exploration of a crucial period in the development of the English novel, integrating critical theory, historical background and sophisticated close reading. Divided into two major sections, the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings. The second section is theoretical and speaks of the transformation in the way that we read and think about authors, readers, characters and form in the light of recent theory, offering an alternative to the deconstructive and Marxist trends in literary studies.

Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical acuity to this insightful study of the major authors and novels of the first half of the twentieth century. An insightful study of British fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Draws on the author’s decades of experience researching and teaching the modern British novel. Sets the modern British novel in its intellectual, cultural and literary contexts. Features close readings of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Passage to India. Shows how these novels are essential components in a modernist cultural tradition which includes the visual arts. Takes account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies. Written in an engaging style, avoiding jargon.

A groundbreaking study of ten difficult years in the life of America’s most important newspaper. From false stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to growing competition from online and twenty-four-hour cable news, the first decade of the twenty-first century was not particularly kind to the New York Times. In this groundbreaking study of the recent life and times of America’s most important newspaper, Daniel R. Schwarz describes the transformation of the Times as it has confronted not only its various scandals and embarrassments but also the rapid rise of the Internet and blogosphere, the ensuing decline in circulation and print advertising, and the change in what readers want and how they want to get it. Drawing on more than forty one-on-one interviews with past and present editors (including every living executive editor), senior figures on the business and financial side, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Schwarz discusses virtually every aspect of the contemporary Times, from columnists to cultural coverage. He explains how, in response to continuous online updating and twenty-four-hour all-news radio and television, the Times has become much more like a daily magazine than a traditional newspaper, with increased analysis (as opposed to reporting) of the news as well as value-added features on health, travel, investing, and food. After carefully tracing the rise of the Times’s website, Schwarz asks whether the Times can survive as a print newspaper, whether it can find a business model to support its vast print and online newsgathering operation, and whether the Sulzberger family can survive as controlling owners. He also asks whether the Times, in its desperate effort to survive, has abandoned its quality standards by publishing what he calls “Timeslite” and “Timestrash.” Writing as a skeptical outsider and devoted lifelong reader, Schwarz concludes that the Times is the worst newspaper in the world—except for all the others. Endtimes? is a must read for Times readers as well as anyone interested in the radical change in print and broadcast media in the rapidly evolving Internet Age. “[A] balanced grappling with big issues and tumultuous changes in journalism and at The Times between 1999 and 2009.” — CHOICE “Fascinating Schwarz raises many questions about the future of printed newspapers and about how Americans will stay informed about news.” — Charleston Gazette-Mail “Endtimes? is a product of brain and heart—passion for its subject, yes, but also clear-eyed critique of that subject’s strengths and weaknesses.” — Huntsville Times “Schwarz is diligent in his research and his interviews He puts the Times on the couch and gives us a very thorough psychoanalysis.” — Washington Independent Review of Books “Struggling to maintain its journalistic preeminence in a world of accelerating change, the New York Times has often stumbled, but not yet fallen. Scrupulously researched, judiciously argued, and accessibly written, Endtimes? provides a sympathetically critical account of the Times’s strengths and weaknesses as it responds to the economic, technological, cultural, and political challenges of our day. No one alarmed by the threatened survival of quality journalism can afford to ignore this trenchant book.” — Martin Jay, author of The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics “Daniel Schwarz’s lucid, well-researched, and passionate book reminded me of the saying that the best criticism comes from admirers who are willing to tell us our faults. Benefiting from his own extensive interviews with key players in the Times’s story, including Max Frankel, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Howell Raines, Schwarz offers a complex, judicious history of a prominent American cultural institution as it responds to a period of crises and turmoil in print journalism. Pulling no punches, Schwarz laments the current version of the paper’s fluff, lack of ‘gatekeeping’ and news judgment, and failure to stand up to government. At the same time, he appreciates how the Times remains, after more than a century, a preeminent source of information. This is a lover’s quarrel at its best.” — Daniel Morris, Purdue University “Dan Schwarz is a knowing reader and a master teacher. Endtimes? shows that he is a great student of journalism as well. He takes us on a roller-coaster ride from the era of the New York Times’s cultural ascendancy to the current financial crisis over its very existence. And he looks into the Times’s future too. Everyone who cares about the news in America should read this book.” — Barry Strauss, author of The Spartacus War “Dan Schwarz writes with terrific energy about an important subject: the threat posed by today’s flood of information to the integrity and even the existence of what is arguably the world’s most influential newspaper. Not every reader will agree with his criticisms of the paper’s leadership or his prescriptions for its survival. But every reader will be deeply informed and sharply challenged by his well-documented narrative and his provocative argument.” — Steven Knapp, The George Washington University

The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris. The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).