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Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies

Ancient and Early Modern Perspectives

Bobby Xinyue editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:8th Feb '24

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Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies cover

This volume offers a new understanding of ancient and early modern literary figurations of time as a mode of delineating, confronting, and critiquing the systems and frameworks that structure life.

Temporalities, Texts, 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 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, the essays in this volume highlight the ways in which time is construed as relational, contestable and politically inflected. The authors show that variations in temporalities enable texts to critique the interactions or tensions between tradition and change, agency and determinism, social system and individual experience. 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.

A stimulating set of reflections on time as it is crafted and conceived across a range literary and philosophical genres. This is a book made to last. -- Tom Phillips, Senior Lecturer in Classical Literature, University of Manchester, UK

ISBN: 9781350257221

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages