Literature and Modern Time

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.

• Simon J. James, Professor of Victorian Literature, Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK

Auteur

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).

Contenu

IntroductionPart 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 TetralogyGatsby's Defunct Clock and the Philosophy of Time'Perpetual Recurrence': The Arrest of Time in Decadent Poetry.Part II Glimpses of EternityEternity Glimpsed and Time Regained: Marcel Proust's Ontological TimeThe '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 FictionJ. W. Dunne: The Time Traveller'To-Day and To-Morrow': Modernism and Futurology