Everyday: Literature, modernity, and time (Gustave Flaubert, France, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad)

There is more to modernity than progress and development, eventfulness and acceleration. Everyday: Literature, Modernity, and Time argues that empty time---marked by boredom, blankness, and the disjunction of past precedent from future opportunity---is a dominant preoccupation of the last two centuries, and that modernist and proto-modernist fiction is its significant mirror. The period's literature is entangled in such issues as how to make the ordinary interesting, how to order the essentially inchoate, and how to give a formal end to what threatens to go on forever. These challenges intersect with a vast array of social developments, such as the rise of the popular media and consumer desire, anxieties about life in an increasingly egalitarian and democratic world, and the changing experience of work in a market defined by imperial expansion and belt-tightening rationalization.; Beginning with Gustave Flaubert and in particular Madame Bovary, Everyday describes the way that a society's temporal disorder---namely, boredom---manifests itself as a literary disorder. Emma Bovary's effort to "write" a romantic event into quotidian domestic life parallels Flaubert's struggle with the banalizing constraints of his genre. With H. G. Wells, the threat of the everyday expands to the world of politics and science. In the trope of thermodynamic "heat death," The Time Machine conveys an anxious ambivalence about the future both of the novel and human progress. Everyday concludes with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a work preoccupied with unemployment---both literally and metaphorically. The novella's narrative temporality is a formal reflection of the changing nature of the labor market and the workplace at the dawn of the twentieth century. If Wells's Time Machine breaks down before a pure present of mindless technologized consumption, Conrad's dystopian everyday is forged under the pressure of economic rationalization and limitless competition.