In Real Time, David F. Bell explores the decisive impact the accelerated movement of people and information had on the fictions of four giants of French realism - Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Zola. Nineteenth-century technological advances radically altered the infrastructure of France, changing the ways ordinary citizens--and literary characters - viewed time, space, distance, and speed. The most influential of these advances included the improvement of the stagecoach, the growth of road and canal networks leading to the advent of the railway, and the increasing use of mail, and of the...