Literature and Modern Time

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).

• 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.

“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)