Formalist criticism of the modern novel has concentrated on its spatial aspects. Patricia Tobin focuses, instead, on the modern novel's temporal structure. She notes that the "genealogical imperative" that dominated the nineteenth-century novel, in which one event gave birth to another, has broken down in the twentieth-century novels she studies. Further, she draws parallels between this collapse of linear narrative and the current challenge to linearity from many other areas of modern thought.

Beginning with Mann's Buddenbrooks as a family chronicle novel that fully embodies...

Formalist criticism of the modern novel has concentrated on its spatial aspects. Patricia Tobin focuses, instead, on the modern novel's temporal structure. She notes that the "genealogical imperative" that dominated the nineteenth-century novel, in which one event gave birth to another, has broken down in the twentieth-century novels she studies. Further, she draws parallels between this collapse of linear narrative and the current challenge to linearity from many other areas of modern thought.

Beginning with Mann's Buddenbrooks as a family chronicle novel that fully embodies...