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

It investigates representations of time in 21st century Anglo-American literature, focusing on innovative timeframes out of sync with the new time logic of digital capitalism. Revising prevalent, oppressive notions of time, fiction offers politically productive temporalities to reclaim the agency of the subject and resist the crisis of time. 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.