Time in Twenty-First-Century British and American Literature (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)

Front, Sonia

ISBN 10: 1041006454 / ISBN 13: 9781041006459

Published by Routledge, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781041006459

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Time in Twenty-First-Century British and American Literature (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1041006454
• ISBN 13: 9781041006459
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.