Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature. As representatives from twenty-four nations argued over adopting the Prime Meridian, and thereby measuring time in relation to Greenwich, England, writers began experimenting with new ways of representing human temporality. Barrows finds this experimentation in works as varied as Victorian adventure novels, high modernist texts, and South Asian novels—including the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Demonstrating the investment of modernist writing in the problems of geopolitics and in the public discourse of time, Barrows argues that it is possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time.

This volume defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. By "locating," the contributors contextualize historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term "transnational," which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. This kind of historical and geographical "locating" implicitly turns against forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which, inspired by poststructural models of all-encompassing semiospheres, on the one hand, and by visions of the utopian communicative potential of new media like the internet, on the other, see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded by transnational agendas. By differentiating between various forms of transnational ideals and ideas in historical and geographical perspective since the Renaissance, the contributors aim to rediscover distinctions -- for instance between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms -- which neo-liberal transnational euphoria has tended to erase.

Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era engages feminist, temporal, and narrative theories to offer fresh examinations of interwar-era accounts by women about travel and movement and considers the use and limitations of time as a subversive force in their texts. This book makes a significant contribution to the under-examined study of women’s travel writing between the wars and synthesises and applies a variety of feminist, narrative, and postcolonial theories to excavate new understandings of the intersection between women, travel, and time in writing. The book studies the emergence of the aviatrix after the Great War and moves through to the representations of war in women’s travel on the brink of World War II. Each chapter offers a unique theoretical framework and examines how experiences of time impact perceptions of women’s bodies and identities, their engagement with history and discourse, and the problematic influence on colonialism. Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era is essential reading to any student or researcher in the field of women’s travel writing, as well as scholars of gender studies, war and interwar history, and cultural heritage.

This book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history, focusing on Turkish, French and German literary traditions. Each from different cultural backgrounds, these modernists provide a radical critique of modern time regimes, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. The book traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson’s theory of time, through Walter Benjamin’s ambivalence towards decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpınar and Robert Walser’s modernist fiction. Negotiating regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories. It is an essential read for scholars and students of comparative and world literature, modernist studies, and cultural history.

Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarshipModernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.Key FeaturesDraws on insights from a range of sources, including critical geography, postcolonial theory, science and technology studies, and time studiesExamines different kinds of objects together: SF, Impressionism, and Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis; evolutionary biology, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Leinster's "e;Sidewise in Time"e;; Woolf, Philip K. Dick's alternate history, and the film Interstellar; bullet time, Faulkner's racialized lag, and Jessica Hagedorn's postcolonial anachronism; "e;big history,"e; Olaf Stapledon's two-billion-year novel of the human species, and Terrence Malick's film Tree of Life

In the years following World War I, the “international” emerged as a distinct scale of political and cultural focus. Internationalisms proliferated in kind as writers and thinkers sought to imagine modes of cooperation that would balance transnational solidarities with national sovereignty. While so-called political realists across the twentieth century have regarded such attempts as wishful thinking, Aarthi Vadde argues that the negotiation of wishing and thinking is at the very heart of internationalism. In Chimeras of Form, she shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe. Major writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire. Vadde lucidly explains how their formal experiments with the novel, short story, poetry, and political essay contribute to and sometimes even anticipate debates in postcolonial theory and cosmopolitanism. She reads Joyce’s use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the “plotless” works of McKay and Lamming upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of twenty-first-century writers Smith and Shailja Patel shows how ongoing conflicts around migration, displacement, and global economic inequality link modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an ambition, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks, and expands our understanding of the ways we have standardized time and have made timekeepers serve as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that not merely values time, but regards access to it as a natural-born right.

This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of 'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts. The title, 'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem 'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.