Time on a Human Scale – Experiencing the Present in Europe, 1860–1930

How have modern Europeans understood the times in which they live? Many accounts of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe tend to emphasize degeneration or acceleration – a return to the past, or the rush to the future. This volume, however, shows how writers, artists, politicians and sociologists brought the present into focus by re-casting time in terms of human experience. With fresh contributions from history, politics, literary studies, musicology, cultural studies and art history, it shows how the search for the human present defined the culture, politics and ideas of Western Europe from the 1860s to the 1930s. The pressing search for the human present uncovered in these essays is, if anything, of even greater relevance today.

Julian Wright is a modern historian concerned with time, individual life-writing, culture and politics. Wright has published two monographs on ideas, political culture, and time in France and edits the journal French History. Wright was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and taught history at Durham University until 2017, when he moved to Northumbria University.


Allegra Fryxell is a cultural historian of modern Europe interested in the interactions between the arts and sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fryxell is currently completing two monographs on time in the fin de siècle and the biography of a mid-century oil industrialist. Following her Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 2017 to 2021, Fryxell will be a member of the Chair for Science Studies at ETH Zürich.