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Literature and Modern Time is a collection of essays that explore literature in the context of a wave of challenges to linear conceptions of time introduced by thinkers such as Bergson, Einstein, McTaggart, Freud and Nietzsche. These challenges were not uniform in character. The volume will demonstrate that literature of the era under scrutiny was not simply reacting to new theories of time-in some cases it is actually inspiring and anticipating them. Thus Literature and Modern Time promises to offer a genuine dialogue between literature and time theory and in doing so will uncover and examine influences and connections- sometimes unexpected-between philosophers and writers of the era. It will examine literary attempts to transcend and escape time and also challenge rupture-based accounts of modernist time by demonstrating that literary texts commonly associated with brokenness, decline or stasis, also, at the same time, maintain faith in healing, renewal and mobility.
This collection contains interdisciplinary research of the quite highest kind - to see so many different kinds of time - narrative, historical, mechanical, subjective, non-linear time, myth and nostalgia - as well as time/space discussed here is very stimulating indeed.
Professor Simon James
List of contents
Introduction.- Part I Technological Modernity.- 'It was in that way that we used to talk, in July, 1914, of Armageddon': Wartime in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End Tetralogy.- Gatsby's Defunct Clock and the Philosophy of Time.- 'Perpetual Recurrence': The Arrest of Time in Decadent Poetry.- Part II Glimpses of Eternity.- Eternity Glimpsed and Time Regained: Marcel Proust's Ontological Time.- The 'Fountain of Consciousness Novel': Dorothy Richardson, Henri Bergson, Gustav Geley.- 'Time's Renewal': Death and Immortality in Thomas Hardy's 'Emma Poems'.- Part III Experiments with Time.- 'Pure Time' and the Female Psyche: Idealism, Psychoanalysis and the Representation of Time in May Sinclair's Fiction.- J. W. Dunne: The Time Traveller.- 'To-Day and To-Morrow': Modernism and Futurology.
About the author
Trish Ferguson is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University. She is the author of
Thomas Hardy's Legal Fictions (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and
Maud Gonne (UCD Press, 2019). She is the editor of
Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-editor of
Victorian Fiction beyond the Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Report
"This volume of essays covers a great deal of ground. It also does so masterfully. ... Its coverage, from the end of the 19th century to the 1930s, proves crucial to revealing the many factors that go into the making of a chronotope, not only within a work of literature but also within an era. As a result, the volume contains much of interest to anyone invested in the study of time." (Stephanie Nelson, Kronoscope, Issue 22, 2022)
