Abstract

This brief Interval, the first of three in the book, pursues implications arising from the argument in Chapter One that early time travel fiction is a residue or fallout from the decline of utopian romance. One conclusion of this argument is that time travel does not originate, as critics often assume, with the literary inventions of one or more science fiction or romance writers, for instance H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, or Enrique Gaspar. Rather, time travel is a complex accommodation to a series of aesthetic and political pressures that destroyed its immediate literary precursors. In light of this "messier" generic history, the Interval offers a thoroughly antithetical proposal for a first time travel story: Harold Steele Mackaye's novel The Panchronicon, an obscure parodic adventure story from 1905.

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