Literature and Modern Time

Literature and Modern Time isa collection of essays that explore literature in the context of a waveof challenges to linear conceptions of time introduced by thinkers suchas Bergson, Einstein, McTaggart, Freud and Nietzsche. These challengeswere not uniform in character. The volume will demonstrate thatliterature of the era under scrutiny was not simply reacting to newtheories of time—in some cases it is actually inspiring and anticipatingthem. Thus Literature and Modern Time promises to offer agenuine dialogue between literature and time theory and in doing so willuncover and examine influences and connections— sometimesunexpected—between philosophers and writers of the era. It will examineliterary attempts to transcend and escape time and also challengerupture-based accounts of modernist time by demonstrating that literarytexts commonly associated with brokenness, decline or stasis, also, atthe 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.