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 timein 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 unexpectedbetween 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
Introduction.- Part I Technological Modernity.- It was in that way that we used to talk, in July, 1914, of Armageddon: Wartime in Ford Madox Fords Parades End Tetralogy.- Gatsbys 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 Prousts Onl31