Reading the European Novel to 1900: A Critical Study of Major Fiction from Cervantes Don Quixote to Zolas Germinal

Written by one of literature’s most esteemed scholars and critics, Reading the Modern European Novel to 1900 is an engaging and in–depth examination of the European novel from Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Zola’s Germinal .  In Daniel R. Schwarz’s inimitable style, which balances formal and historical criticism in precise, readable prose, this book offers close readings of individual texts with attention to each one’s cultural and canonical context.  Major texts of the period are included: Cervantes’ Don Quixote ; Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina ; Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground , Crime and Punishment , and The Brothers Karamazov ; Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma ; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education ; Balzac’s Pere Goriot ; and Zola’s Germinal . Throughout, Schwarz examines the history and evolution of the novel during this period and defines each author’s aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical significance. Incorporating important pedagogical suggestions and the latest research, this text provides accessible and lucid discussion of the European novel to 1900 for students, teachers, and general readers interested in the evolution of the novelistic form.

Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1968. He is regarded as among the world’s leading critic–scholars of the form, history, and meaning of the novel.He has written sixteen books covering a wide variety of subjects from renowned studies of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and critical theory as well as the Holocaust and New York City culture . Most recently, he is the author of Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times, (2012; new paperback edition, 2014), In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty–First Century (Wiley–Blackwell, 2008), and Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 (Blackwell, 2004). He blogs regularly on the media and higher education for the Huffington Post and has lectured all over the world.