Prosaic Times

"By capturing the temporal dimensions in Wordsworth's The Prelude, Richardson's Clarissa, Flaubert's "Un Coeur Simple," and Melville's Moby Dick, John Park argues that these literary works of realism - the artistic claim to represent life as it is - do not necessarily depend upon the plotline of the story they tell. The reduced significance placed on plot is counterbalanced by something else: an experience of duration, a sheer extension of time in reading, a sense of time stemming from the unique stylistic innovations in each work"--