"The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first present-tense novels shaped by interior monologues and avant-garde factography (e.g. in Arthur Schnitzler or James Joyce) and the use of the present-tense in the tradition of modernism, the history of present-tense narration has changed the conditions of fictional narration over the course of its century-long development, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, for an understanding of the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers (J. M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon to name only a few) it is both necessary to understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its (historical) transformation to a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling.For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of an epochal evolution in 20th- and 21st-century fiction"--