ABSTRACT
This chapter interprets the novels of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and Conrad as stages in a process by which history came to seem increasingly impossible to represent in the modern world. His theoretical approach is Marxist insofar as he attributes this alienation from history to the development of capitalism, and draws on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. Reilly finds the radical suggestion that event and discourse are produced simultaneously. Reilly's account elucidates Conrad's combination of explicitly conservative values with what seems a radical understanding of economic oppression. Reilly relates the sense of deadlock and stasis in Nostromo to Georg Lukacs's view that reifying description in nineteenth-century realism is indicative of subservience to an ideology. However, Reilly goes on to use Walter Benjamin's account of epic theatre to suggest that Nostromo conveys, not the stasis of reification, but the strain of unresolved contrary forces, in society, in history, and in its author.
