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Author Barrows, Adam, author.

Title The cosmic time of empire : modern Britain and world literature / Adam Barrows
Published Berkeley : University of California Press, ©2011

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 211 pages) : illustrations
Series Flashpoints ; 3
Flashpoints (Berkeley, Calif.) ; 3.
Contents Introduction : modernism and the politics of time -- Standard time, Greenwich, and the cosmopolitan clock -- "Turning from the shadows that follow us": modernist time and the politics of place -- At the limits of imperial time; or, dracula must die! -- "The shortcomings of timetables" : Greenwich, modernism, and the limits of modernity -- "A few hours wrong" : standard time and Indian literature in English -- Conclusion : a postmodern politics of time? Negri's "global phenomenological fabric" and Amis's backward arrow
Summary 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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-204) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Time in literature.
Modernism (Literature) -- English-speaking countries
Time -- Political aspects
Time -- Systems and standards.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
English fiction
Modernism (Literature)
Time in literature
Time -- Political aspects
Time -- Systems and standards
English-speaking countries
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2010019955
ISBN 9780520948150
0520948157
1283277441
9781283277440
9786613277442
6613277444