Time in Twenty-First-Century British and American Literature: Out of Sync

This book investigates representations of time in twenty-first-century Anglo-American literature. In the digital era, characterized by a new regime of time, fiction offers revisions of prevalent, oppressive notions of time that can serve as productive political strategies to reclaim the agency of the subject. This book discusses literary texts that craft innovative temporal structures out of sync with the new time logic: suspended temporality (Chapter 1); time as a conflation of phenomenological experience and cosmological laws (Chapter 2); previewing the future (Chapter 3); and networked memory (Chapter 4). The proposed politically productive temporalities, such as deep presence or resonance, compatibilism, contingency, and the use of narrative as a chronologizing strategy, ground a vision of change and suggest a way out of the crisis of time. Identifying new timeframes in twenty-first-century fiction by an array of writers, this book demonstrates that literature remains a valid medium for theorizing and representing time.

Sonia Front is Professor in the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She teaches literature and media studies. Her research interests include time and temporality as well as representations of consciousness in twenty-first-century literature, film and television. Her previous monograph is titled Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction. She is the Vice President of the International Society for the Study of Time.