In Shadowtime Jim Reilly asks some critical questions about literature's relation to the cerished principles of history: origination, historical reconstruction, possession and the very concept of Real. Boldly taking up Adorno's assertion about the crisis of twentieth-century art and its inability to represent historical events, Reilly searches for the roots of this problem and its articulation within the works of Hardy, Conrad, and George Eliot. Drawing on the theories of Benjamin, Foucault, Hegel, Lukacs, and Nietzsche, the author constructs a powerful argument across the entire period of historicism's triumph and decline. Presenting an outstanding combination of original readings and indispensible survey, Shadowtime is ideal critical material for anyone studying nineteenth-century realism, modernism and the history of aesthetics.