Many poets, playwrights, and novelists have grappled with the concept of time. Even more scholars have analyzed how novelists have used time for structuring, organizing, plotting and philosophizing. This collection of essays about the use of time in the novel is unique not only because the writers cover a wide range of concepts of time, but also because they locate certain novels within a specific time culture. The chapters analyze novels (and one film) with definite time cultures, providing hints as to the future of the use of time in the novel. Emily Bald’s chapter begins the collection in the nineteenth century with Life in the Iron Mills showing both inner time – the perceptual time which fluctuates with the vicissitudes of affective experience – and external time, which has become known as clock time. This ties in well with Rachel Kaufmann’s chapter exploring felt time in contemporary women’s literature. Marco Caracciolo’s chapter adds “cosmic time” to Ricoeur’s monumental and mortal time with the case studies of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life. Two chapters explore the effects of World War Two: AJ Burgin presents the disorienting technique of Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow that shows time going backwards – even in dialogue. Raymond Burt presents two novels of Michael Köhlmeier, a contemporary Austrian writer, spanning the decades since the end of World War Two, with his chapter drawing the link between time and morality. The final chapter on Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler shows the multiplicity of time that the previous chapters have demonstrated so clearly.
Terms such as affect, truth, haunting, memory, reality, identity, morality and mortality all resonate within these chapters as characters within the novels and their specific culture areas grapple with time, recall the past, and attempt to live in the present. Many of the writers in this collection point towards possible new methods of dealing with time; reading methods; engaging with the novel writers of the future in new and interesting relationships. Here, Time has not been wasted.
