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“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in particular: that deep time thinking and ecocriticism should be considered in conjunction, and that literature and the arts play a vital role in fostering a deep time awareness. Digressions in Deep Time is the first collection of essays which considers the multifarious representations of deep time across literature and the arts, assembling the work of a wide range of prominent scholars whose research frequently engages with temporality and ecocriticism. Featured contributions include work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the late seventies, as well as chapters by Richard Irvine (author of An Anthropology of Deep Time), Benjamin Morgan (author of The Outward Mind) and Andrew Tate (author of Apocalyptic Fiction).

This book examines the interrelationships between trauma, time, and narrative in the novel The Journey (1962) by the scholar, novelist, poet, and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler. Drawing on Paul Ricœur's philosophy of time and studies of time in literature, Julia Menzel analyzes how Adler's novel depicts the experience of time as a dimension of Holocaust victims'trauma. She explores the aesthetic temporality of The Journey and presents a new interpretation of the literary text, which she conceives of as a modern “Zeit-Roman” (time novel). Die Studie untersucht die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Trauma, Zeit und Erzählung in dem Roman Eine Reise (1962) des Wissenschaftlers, Schriftstellers, Dichters und Holocaust-Überlebenden H. G. Adler. Unter Bezugnahme auf Paul Ricœurs Zeitphilosophie und die literaturwissenschaftliche Zeitforschung analysiert Julia Menzel, wie Adlers Roman traumatische Zeiterfahrungen der Opfer des Holocaust zur Darstellung bringt. Sie erkundet die ästhetische Eigenzeit von Eine Reise und eröffnet eine neue Lesart des literarischen Texts, den sie als modernen Zeit-Roman begreift.

Analyzing the stylistic innovations most characteristic in pivotal works of literary realism, Prosaic Times shows how their styles are not merely ornamental but fundamental to building their own temporalities. By capturing the temporal dimensions in Wordsworth's The Prelude, Richardson's Clarissa, Flaubert's “Un Coeur Simple,” and Melville's Moby Dick, John Park argues that these literary works of realism – the artistic claim to represent life as it is – do not necessarily depend upon the plotline of the story they tell. The reduced significance placed on plot is counterbalanced by something else: an experience of duration, a sheer extension of time in reading, a sense of time stemming from the unique stylistic innovations in each work. Contrasting with the view that realism represents social conditions, this book claims that while realist works represent society, they themselves are not bound to social conditions. Instead, literary realism accounts for ways of configuring history that render social conditions understandable. The active quality of language, of what narrative discourse says and does in forming our understanding of real things and events, is brought directly to the reader's attention in these works. Through close readings that analyze, among other things, the natural objects and scenes of experience; dense, temporal overlapping of accounts; the depiction of the quotidian ways of a village; and the boundless occasion for “timeless” metaphysical reflections, Park shows how narration not only “takes” time, but ultimately makes time part of the experience it represents to the reader.

Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe examines migrant stories through the lens of temporality as seen in the role of such issues as integration, waiting, detention, trauma, crisis, and imagined futures. This book argues that a focus on different time scales and perceptions of time will help us understand how the intimate and affective subjectivities of more complex narratives of migration, as articulated in literature, cross into the public sphere and challenge political ‘bubbles.'This collection showcases new approaches to and innovative readings of different forms of literary and cultural migration narratives. In addition to developing theoretical tools for the study, the authors present innovative case studies addressing topics such as the European refugee crisis, migration narratives and border crossings in Britain, Spain, and Morocco, as well as experiences of migration in Finland and Norway.

'Time travels in divers paces with divers people.'Shakespeare's oft-quoted line contains a hidden ambiguity: not only do individual people experience time differently, but time travels in diverse paces when we are with diverse persons. The line articulates a contemporary understanding of subjective time: it is changed by interaction with our social environment. Interacting with other people—and even literary characters—can slow or quicken the experience of time. Interactive time, and the paradigm of enactive cognition in which it sits, calls for an expansion of traditional ideas of time in narrative. The first book-length study of interactive time in narrative, Catching Time explains how lived time and narrative time interpenetrate each other, so that the relational model of subjective time acts as a narrative function. Catching Time develops a novel, interdisciplinary framework, drawing on cognitive science, narratology, and linguistics, to understand the patterns of temporality that shape narrative.

Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games investigates the potential of queer conceptions of time to unbind forms of understanding identities. In doing so, it recognizes the power of time to determine us but chooses to queer time and turn it into an ally of unbound forms of understanding identities.Through the analysis of different media—literature, cinema, and video games—the chapters revolve around three key ideas: that there are inherently queer styles of using and dealing with time and temporality in culture; that the critical rediscovery of canonical texts and the analysis of largely ignored queer texts and authors allow for a better understanding of queer identities; and, finally, that normative conceptions of time can—and should—be challenged through critical tools that reconceptualize notions of the self around time.This volume will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working close to areas such as queer and gender studies, media and cinema studies, cultural studies, literary theory, comparative literature, game studies, and art history.

Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart traces the trajectory of modernist interaction with Bergson and Einstein through the works of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and Mary Butts (1890–1937). It presents an overview of critical approaches that focus on time in Woolf's novels, and that foreground Bergson in their analyses of Woolf. It then examines how Woolf's formal experimentation, and theorisation of time, in Jacob's Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) relates to Bergson's temporal theories. This is followed by a discussion on the role Bergson's thinking played in the early formulation of Butts's ideas of time, and an analysis of how Bergson's ideas emerge in the short story ‘Angele au Couvent'(1923), concluding by highlighting points of contrast in the engagements of Woolf and Butts. The book then documents the growth of Butts's interest in Einstein's ideas and shows how she amalgamates these with Bergson's thinking in her journals and in the most intense of her fictional engagement with Einstein's ideas, the novel Death of Felicity Taverner (1932). It discusses Butts's responses to the popular science genre and examines the important role played by J. W. N. Sullivan and Arthur Eddington in the development of her understanding, and interpretation, of physics. It concludes with a discussion of Butts's antisemitic characterisation of Kralin, as purveyor of corrupted science, in contrast with the Taverners, who are conscious of durée and delight in the abstractions of scientific truth.

This book considers the new ways time was experienced in the sixteenth- and seventeeth-century Hispanic world in the framework of global Catholicism. It underscores the crucial role that the imitation of Christ plays in modeling how representative writers physically and mentally interiorize temporal impermanence as the Messiah's suffering body becomes a paradigmatic as well as malleable marker of the avatars of earthly history. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which authors adapt Christ-centered conceptions of existence to accommodate both a volatile post-eschatological world and the increased dominance of mechanical clock time. As novel means of communing with Christ emerge, so too do new modes of sensing and understanding time, unleashing unprecedented cultural and literary reinvention. This is demonstrated through close analyses of writings by such influential figures as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

The opening of the first commercial theatre in London in 1579 initiated a pattern of development that radically reshaped representation. The competition among theatres required the constant production of new works, creating an interplay between the innovations of producers and the rapidly changing perceptions of audiences. The result was a process of incremental change that redefined perceptions of time, action, and identity. Aristotle in the Poetics contrasted a similar set of formal developments to the earlier system of the epics, which, like many predecessors of early modern drama, had emerged from largely oral traditions. Located in the context of contemporary relations between the academy and Indigenous communities, Time and Causality in Early Modern Drama: Plotting Revenge traces these developments through changes in the revenge tragedy form and questions our abilities, habituated to literacy, to fully understand or appreciate the complexity and operations of oral systems.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies provides a new analysis of the significance of time in Classical and early modern literature, demonstrating that literary temporality continually intervenes in questions of ontology, hierarchy and politics. Examining a diverse range of texts from Homeric epic to eighteenth-century poems on the Last Judgement, this collection of essays contends that temporality in literature sits at the heart of how authors from antiquity through to the early modern period understood and negotiated the structures that shaped their lives and may shape lives to come.Approaching the topic through four themes, the essays in this volume highlight the ways in which time is construed as relational, contestable and politically inflected. The authors show that variations in temporalities enable texts to critique the interactions or tensions between tradition and change, agency and determinism, social system and individual experience. The result is a refreshing approach to literary figurations of time that responds to the recent'temporal turn'in the humanities, engages with current critical trends (such as ontological analysis and ecological criticism), and opens up an exciting new direction for future research on the connection between time, text, and context.

Yeats, Revivalism, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.

Writing Time shows how serial literature based in journals and anthologies shaped the awareness of time at a transformative moment in the European literary and political landscapes. Sean Franzel explores how German-speaking authors and editors'write time'both by writing about time and by mapping time itself through specific literary formats.Through case studies of such writers as F. J. Bertuch, K. A. Böttinger, J. W. Goethe, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine, Franzel analyzes how serial writing predicated on open-ended continuation becomes a privileged mode of social commentary and literary entertainment and provides readers with an ongoing'history'of the present, or Zeitgeschichte. Drawing from media theory and periodical studies as well as from Reinhart Koselleck's work on processes of temporalization and'untimely'models of historical time, Writing Time presents'smaller'literary forms—the urban tableau, cultural reportage, and caricature—as new ways of imagining temporal unfolding, recentering periodicals and other serial forms at the heart of nineteenth-century print culture.

Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature conducts an expansive exploration of different modes of timing. Its seven chapters pursue the question of time as it is embodied in key figures that shape both aesthetic and pragmatic life. Working closely with literary, visual, and musical artworks, the book aims to provoke new ways of engaging with the question of time. It treats artworks as experiments that launch temporal figures, and that test out the possibilities and connections these different figures enable. Thus, the book seizes upon works by artists like Anne Carson, King Tubby, and Raymond Queneau as opportunities for thinking through the valence of both existing and untested temporal configurations. What other modes of shaping time, it asks, might be conjured out of the viewing of an Omer Fast film, the reading of a poem by Baudelaire, or of a novel by Tom McCarthy? In treating artworks as temporal experiments, this book stresses the fact that artworks always experiment with the raw materials of time, fashioning it or refashioning it into novel combinations. This book follows the imperatives of these experiments in order to advance a nuanced understanding of the way time insinuates itself into all aspects of social and intellectual life.

The essays in this collection explore various various models of representing temporality in ancient Greek and Roman literature to elucidate how structures of time communicate meaning, as well as the way that the cultural impact of measured time is reflected in ancient texts.This collection serves as a meditation on the different ways that cosmological and experiential time are construed, measured, and manipulated in Greek and Latin literature. It explores both the kinds of time deemed worthy of measurement, as well as time that escapes notice. Likewise, it interrogates how linear time and its representation become politicized and leveraged in the service of emerging and dominant power structures. These essays showcase various contemporary theoretical approaches to temporality in order to build bridges and expose chasms between ancient and modern ideologies of time. Some of the areas explored include the philosophical and social implications of time that is not measured, the insights and limitations provided by queer theory for an investigation of the way sex and gender relate to time, the relationship of time to power, the extent to which temporal discourses intersect with spatial constructs, and finally an exploration of experiences that exceed the boundaries of time.Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature is of interest to scholars of time and temporality in the ancient world, as well as those working on time and temporality in English literature, comparative literature, history, sociology, and gender and sexuality. It is also suitable for those working on Greek and Roman literature and culture more broadly.

Nicht nur die Zeit des Menschen, auch die Eigenzeiten der Literatur stehen heute in einem vielschichtigen Spannungsverhältnis zur Zeit der Natur. Doch welche Mittel besitzt die Literatur, um die menschliche Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit für die Zeiten anderer Lebewesen oder gar für planetarische Zeitmaße zu sensibilisieren? Wie geht die zunehmende Mathematisierung der Zeit in sie ein? Und in welchem Verhältnis stehen literaturhistorische Zäsuren zu Paradigmenwechseln in den Naturwissenschaften? Diesen und weiteren Fragen geht der Sammelband nach, indem er exemplarisch die Genealogie der literarischen Verzeitlichung von Natur nachvollzieht – von den kosmischen Fiktionen um 1800 bis zu den Geschichten vom Anthropo-, Cthulhu- und Kapitalozän, die das 21. Jahrhundert prägen.​

This book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history, focusing on Turkish, French and German literary traditions. Each from different cultural backgrounds, these modernists provide a radical critique of modern time regimes, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. The book traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson's theory of time, through Walter Benjamin's ambivalence towards decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpınar and Robert Walser's modernist fiction. Negotiating regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories. It is an essential read for scholars and students of comparative and world literature, modernist studies, and cultural history.

Shapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of time—beyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of history—at the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernism—those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—he identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concepts of temporal and spatial form, McGillen contends, contribute to the understanding not only of modernist literature but also of larger theoretical concerns within modern cultural and intellectual history.

Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the long twentieth century - one that illuminates the contradictory temporalities that underlie narratives of progress, modernization and development. The book contributes to the resurgence of interest in time within literary studies by demonstrating that waiting is also integral to postcolonial temporalities, from anticolonial nationalist movements for independence to forms of reconciliation after conflict. In addition to innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time of acceleration and movement by arguing for the centrality of waiting to time-consciousness in the postcolonial world.

O ser humano sempre foi fascinado pela temporalidade e criou ficções sobre o tempo que lhe permitiram refletir sobre seu presente, seu passado ou imaginar o futuro. No mundo lusófono, em contextos históricos marcados pela colonialidade, violência ou trauma, a ficção literária e cinematográfica que os põe em cena desordena o tempo linear devido à complexidade de representação que implicam, e surgem desajustes temporais. Desta forma, e tendo como pano de fundo o conceito de destempo, as contribuições reunidas na presente coletânea refletem sobre diferentes representações do tempo, bem como sobre as camadas, entrecruzamentos e rupturas das temporalidades em textos literários e cinematográficos em língua portuguesa. Der Mensch war schon immer von der Zeitlichkeit fasziniert und hat Fiktionen über die Zeit geschaffen, die es ihm ermöglichten, über seine Gegenwart oder Vergangenheit nachzudenken bzw. die Zukunft zu imaginieren. In der portugiesischsprachigen Welt, in historischen Kontexten also, die von Kolonialität, Gewalt und Trauma geprägt sind, bringen die literarischen und filmischen Fiktionen, die diese Kontexte in Szene setzen, die lineare Zeit aufgrund der komplexen Darstellungsformen durcheinander; sie lösen sie nachgerade auf und es kommt zu zeitlichen Verwerfungen und Verschmelzungen. Vor dem Hintergrund des Konzepts des destempo reflektieren die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge unterschiedliche Repräsentationen von Zeit sowie die zahlreichen Schichten, Überschneidungen und Brüche von Zeitlichkeiten in portugiesischsprachigen literarischen und filmischen Texten.

Wenn Vergil in seiner Aeneis von der Flucht der Trojaner und ihrer konfliktreichen Ankunft in Italien erzählt, spiegelt sich in den Leiden und Kämpfen der mythologischen Helden zugleich seine eigene Gegenwart und die seiner zeitgenössischen Leser. Der Bezug zwischen diesen beiden Zeitebenen wird aber nicht nur an prominenten Stellen wie etwa in der sogenannten Heldenschau oder der Schildbeschreibung explizit hergestellt, sondern auch durch die vor modernen Hintergründen spielende Handlung immer wieder in Erinnerung gerufen. Während solche Verstöße gegen die Chronologie seit der Antike vorwiegend als Fehler wahrgenommen wurden, versteht sie Dennis Pausch in seinem Buch als Zeitmontagen und als literarische Technik, die nicht nur einen wichtigen Beitrag zur politischen Botschaft, sondern vor allem zur ästhetischen Wirkung des Werkes leisten.

In this book, Sarah Cash examines the intersection of music and temporality in British literature of the long nineteenth century. The sound spaces created at these intersections function as antimimetic resistance to hegemonic structures. Through its temporal multiplicity, music resonates in excess of linear time, revealing a metaphoric soundedness in the text that subverts reader expectation and reveals how seemingly realist nineteenth-century novels transgress the limitations of their classic narratological structures. In even the most apparently'realist'texts, the most extravagant, excessive, and hyperbolic elements exceed the bounds of what we often consider real, disrupting mimetic bias. Cash argues that music offers the most dynamic way to expose this vexed temporality in the text. Through scholarly intervention a disruption of historic classifications show that Victorians are heirs of Romanticism's musical ideals, including the power of music to penetrate and transform space and time and the permanence of sound as it reverberates beyond human perception. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature, temporality, and gender studies will find this book of particular interest.

Helmut Puff invites readers to visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting. From literature, memoirs, manuals, chronicles, visuals, and other documents, Puff presents a history of waiting anchored in antechambers—interior rooms designated and designed for people to linger. In early modern continental Western Europe, antechambers became standard in the residences of the elites. As a time-space infrastructure these rooms shaped encounters between unequals. By imposing spatial distance and temporal delays, antechambers constituted authority, rank, and power. Puff explores both the logic and the experience of waiting in such formative spaces, showing that time divides as much as it unites, and that far from what people have said about early moderns, they approached living in time with apprehensiveness. Unlike how contemporary society primarily views the temporal dimension, to early modern Europeans time was not an objective force external to the self but something that was tied to acting in time. Divided only by walls and doors, waiters sought out occasions to improve their lot. At other times, they disrupted the scripts accorded them. Situated at the intersection of history, literature, and the history of art and architecture, this wide-ranging study demonstrates that waiting has a history that has much to tell us about social and power relations in the past and present.

In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. “Fugitive time” names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release but is instead about sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City to Sun Ra's transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of “Unity of Time” and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

Reading Time tells the story of the long poem in the long eighteenth century as it navigated between narrative and description, progress and digression, and time and space. The long poem emerged, between 1660 and 1850, as a medium in which poets could shape and reshape time. Analysing Milton's Paradise Lost, Thomson's The Seasons and Wordsworth's The Prelude, this study reveals how these poets used both the content and form of their long poems to intervene in contemporary debates about the temporalities of free will, nature and identity. Reading Time argues that they use the figure of the prospect, the extended landscape, to imagine time as a space onto which different causal configurations could be mapped. In turn, readers have approached these poems as both temporal and spatial forms, as linear processes and as static structures, demonstrating how the long poem can shape a reader's own experience of time.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer's sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was sometimes viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer's diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters'ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.

In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now. Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to rethink prevailing temporal frameworks. At the same time, it models the anachronistic, time-blending, and time-layering temporality it advances. In a series of experimental chapters informed by the unlikely trio of Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, and Virginia Woolf, Leckie reinflects and cowrites the traditions and knowledges of the long nineteenth century and the current period in the spirit of climate action collaboration. The current moment demands as many approaches as possible, invites us to take risks, and asks scholars and activists adept at storytelling to participate in the conversation. Climate Change, Interrupted, accordingly, invests in interruption to tell a different story of the climate crisis.

This study offers a series of readings of Dickens's later novels: Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.The discussions of the novels assume the basic distinction between the arrangement of events in their chronological order (story) and their arrangement in the narrative (plot), and are based on Genette's classifications of the various types of anachronies as well as on the more functionally oriented categories of anachronies I myself suggest.The temporal organization of the narratives, in upsetting the sequential order of events in specific ways, invites reflection on the very nature of the notion of causality, which, in turn, is related to two interconnected ideas: that truth is not always to be found by logical reasoning and that appearances do not necessarily convey the truth. Closely related to these ideas is a Christian attitude towards time: both linear and circular forms of time are subsumed and at the same time re-formulated within a Christian vision of time, informed by the basic human feelings of love and compassion.

This collection of articles is an important milestone in the history of the study of time conceptions in Greek and Roman Antiquity. It spans from Homer to Neoplatonism. Conceptions of time are considered from different points of view and sources. Reflections on time were both central and various throughout the history of ancient philosophy. Time was a topic, but also material for poets, historians and doctors. Importantly, the contributions also explore implicit conceptions and how language influences our thought categories.

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.

This book brings together critical essays on time, history and narrativity and the explorations of these concepts in philosophy, music, art and literature.The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to narrative theories as well as philosophical discourses on time, memory and the self. Drawing insights from western and eastern philosophy, it discusses themes such as subjectivity and identity in historical narratives, theorization of time in cinema and other arts and the relationship between the understandings of existence, consciousness and concepts such as Kala, Aion, and yugas. The book also looks at the narrativization of history across cultures by exploring modern fiction from China and India, murals of martyrs in Northern Ireland, music and films set against the canvas of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as diasporic cultural histories.This book will be an interesting read for scholars and researchers of comparative literature, history, philosophy of history, cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

Est-il vrai, comme l'a chanté Léo Ferré, qu'« avec le Temps, va, tout s'en va »? Que reste-t-il après son passage? Certes la vie est fragile, constamment menacée d'anéantissement : et à travers la poésie des ruines, c'est déjà un spectacle fascinant. Mais l'histoire comme l'art témoignent d'une possible survie. Ce livre montre comment quelques artistes ont voulu traverser le temps, et retrouver dans la poussière des siècles les traces de battements de coeurs à jamais éteints. À travers l'étude de quelques oeuvres cinématographiques, l'ouvrage aborde la perception variable du temps chez de grands créateurs. En conclusion, le livre évoque la figure de Virginia Woolf, profonde et sensible méditation sur la beauté et la fragilité de la vie humaine, en même temps que sur la capacité éventuelle de l'art à en soustraire quelque part à la mort.

A comparative study of two classic literary works, from a specialist in Joyce and Homer Time and Identity in “Ulysses” and the “Odyssey” offers a unique in-depth comparative study of two classic literary works, examining essential themes such as change, the self, and humans'dependence on and isolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyce and Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time—that people are constantly changing yet remain the same across the years. In Nelson's analysis, both Ulysses and the Odyssey explore dichotomies including the permanence of names and shifting of stories, independence and connection, and linear and cyclical narrative. Nelson discusses Homer's contrast of ordinary to mythic time alongside Joyce's contrast of “clocktime” to experienced time. She analyzes the characters Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, alienated from their previous selves; Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus, trapped by the past; and Penelope and Molly Bloom, able to recast time through weaving, storytelling, and memory. These concepts are also explored through Joyce's radically different narrative styles and Homer's timeless world of the gods. Nelson's thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, Joyce, narratology, oral tradition, and translation results in a volume that speaks across literary specializations. This book makes the case that Ulysses and the Odyssey should be read together and that each work highlights and clarifies aspects of the other. As Joyce's characters are portrayed as both flux and fixity, readers will see Homer's hero fight his way out of myth and back into the constant changes of human existence. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Awarded the Tudor Vianu Prize for Literary and Cultural Theory by the National Museum of Romanian Literature. Over the past 30 years, the fields of world literature and world cinema have developed on parallel but largely separate tracks, with little recognition of their underlying similarities and the ways that each can learn from the other. Time Regained does not move from literature to cinema, but exists simultaneously in both fields. The 7 filmmakers selected here, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Raúl Ruíz, Wong Kar Wai, Stephen Daldry, and Paolo Sorrentino, are themselves also writers or people with literary training, and they produce a new type of world cinema thanks to their understanding of the world simultaneously through literature and film. In the process, their films produce new readings of literary texts that world literature studies wouldn't have been able to achieve with its own instruments.Time Regained examines how filmmakers build on literature to reconfigure the world as a landscape of dreams and how they use film to reinvent the narrative techniques of the authors on whom they draw. The selected filmmakers draw inspiration from French surrealists, modernists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Marguerite Yourcenar, and predecessors such as Dante and Cao Xueqin. In the process, these filmmakers cross the borders between film and literature, nation and world, dream and reality.