Product Description: In Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future...read more

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers – J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few – it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling.For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

Product Description: Time and narrative are inseparably connected: there can be no narrative without time, and no time without narrative. Beyond this systemic relationship, which has been a favorite concern of narrative theory, the interplay of time and narrative evokes a broad range of aesthetic phenomena...read more

Product Description: Explores the relationship between unexpected events in narrative and lifeFocusing on surprise, spontaneous eruption and the unforeseeable, The Unexpected argues that stories help us to reconcile what we expect with what we experience...read more

Product Description: To what extent can imaginative events be situated in time and history? From the medieval to the early modern period, this question is intriguingly explored in the expansive literary genre of romance. This collective study, edited by Jon Whitman, is the first systematic investigation of that formative process during more than four hundred years...read more

Product Description: Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo...read more

Product Description: Matters of Time provides an unorthodox array of perspectives on materialist thought and representation in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. Time is figured as the quintessential revolutionary concept, through key historical moments from Jean Jaurès’ orientation of the socialists at the turn of the century to the inter-generational conflict and politicization of everyday life in May ’68...read more

Sudden changes, opportunities or revelations have always carried a special significance in western culture, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical experiences of conversion. This fascinating book explores the ways in which England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, attached importance to moments and events that compress great significance into small units of time. Sue Zemka questions the importance that modernity invests in momentary events, from religion to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a strain in Victorian and early modern novels critical of the values the age invested in moments of time, and suggests that such novels also offer a correction to contemporary culture and criticism, with its emphasis on the momentary event as an agency of change.

Product Description: A book that harvests the author's work, over several decades, on narrative and time, the place of imagination in conceptual thinking, and the underlying nature of historical accounts.

Product Description: An interdisciplinary study of the Impressionist/early Modernist works of Conrad and Ford, this book aims to show how the represented temporalities (whether to do with past, present, future experience within and without the novels, or logical/structural relations of 'before' and 'after') are at the core of the won effects of both authors' oeuvres...read more

Product Description: This book consists of translations of fourteen Japanese short stories from the experiment modernist tradition by both canonical writers and important authors who have received little or no attention in English. The intent of the collection is to add to t

Product Description: Society and contemporary culture seem forever fascinated by the topic of time. In modern fiction, Ian McEwan (The Child in Time) and Martin Amis (Time's Arrow) have led the way in exploring the human condition in relation to past, present and future...read more

Product Description: The Iliad defines its poetic goal as preserving the kleos aphthiton, “fame unwithered,” (IX.413) of its hero, Achilles. But how are we to understand the status of the “unwithered” in the Iliad? In Homeric Durability, Lorenzo F...read more

Product Description: Each Hour Redeem advances a major reinterpretation of African American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present by demonstrating how its authors are centrally concerned with racially different experiences of time...read more

Product Description: For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit...read more

Product Description: Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Marking Time presents an innovative account of literary time, in which the temporality and ontology of the literary are seen to be essentially intertwined. Individual chapters trace the stakes of this view of time for the status and 'economy' of the literary text across five 20th-century writers in French whose work is characterized by a fundamental and searching self-questioning: Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, and Roger Laporte...read more