The Pace of Fiction

Abstract We talk about pace, often: the pace of history, modern life, everyday movement. And, really, we have talked about pace for centuries. But we hardly know what it means or how one might analyze it. The Pace of Fiction starts from the notion that all pace is, essentially, a product of narrative, and narrative fiction is what produces pace most elaborately. It moves forward as a history of transformations in narrative movement, from Fielding and Goethe and Austen to George Eliot, Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Hemingway, Woolf, and Mann. Pace reveals narrative in its most elaborate effects. And the way pace changes in fiction expresses much of what we refer to as the pace of modernity.