Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarship

Modernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.

Key Features

• Draws on insights from a range of sources, including critical geography, postcolonial theory, science and technology studies and time studies
• Examines different kinds of objects together: SF, Impressionism, and Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis; evolutionary biology, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Leinster's "Sidewise in Time"; Woolf, Philip K. Dick's alternate history, and the films Interstellar and Tree of Life