MACMILLAN Literature and Modern Time: Technological Modernity; Glimpses of Eternity; Experiments with 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. Professor Simon James From the Back Cover 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 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).