Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies

Book excerpt: "Texts, Temporalities, Ideologies provides a new analysis of the significance of time in Classical and early modern literature, demonstrating that literary temporality continually intervenes in questions of ontology, hierarchy, and politics. Examining a diverse range of texts from Homeric epic to eighteenth-century poems on the Last Judgement, this collection of essays contends that temporality in literature is not merely a matter of storytelling, but sits at the heart of how authors from antiquity through to the early modern period understood and negotiated the structures that shaped their lives and may shape lives to come. Approaching the topic through four themes, this volume highlights the ways in which time is construed as relational, contestable, and politically inflected. It shows that variations in temporalities enable texts to critique the interactions or tensions between tradition and change, agency and determinism, social system and individual experience. This book not only expands on how temporality works in well-studied genres such as lyric, but also sheds new light on the conception, arrangement, and uses of time in genres that have received less attention, such as letters, biographies, and early modern texts that rework or converse with Classical paradigms. The result is a refreshing approach to literary figurations of time that responds to the recent 'temporal turn' in the humanities, engages with current critical trends (such as ontological analysis and ecological criticism), and opens up an exciting new direction for future research on the connection between time, text, and context."--