Reading Modernist Time Through Four Women Writers

Written perhaps partially in response to the recent celebration of spatial tropes in discussions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and thought, Randall's book offers insight into the temporal. In her introduction, she asserts that "while attention to such spatial metaphors is of course crucial to understanding the elaboration of alternative temporalities, excessive attention to the spatial can tend to occlude the extent to which these writers are acutely aware of living in time, of the specific uses of time available or unavailable to them, to their characters, to humanity in general."

The writers under question for Randall include Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, H.D. and Virginia Woolf, and in that way her book also contributes to the vast body of scholarship on women writers. Randall shows her careful study of literary scholars and theorists, aligning herself with Franco Moretti's critique of Henri Lefebvre, for example, challenging Michel de Certeau's own stated reliance on uses of space to discover his insights on temporality, and demonstrating her strong understanding of the field through references to critics from J. Hillis Miller through Paul Fussell to Michael Levenson.

Central to her reading is the concept of dailiness that has, Randall argues, "a fundamental influence on the ways in which human beings are able to conceptualise time." She asserts that the day "is particularly important in that its shorter cycle enables a more direct experience of its repetitive structure; it is more manageable to compare days with each other than months, or years." In the close readings offered in the bulk of her book, Randall explores those concepts of repetition and the cycle of one day in order to provide interesting perspectives on her chosen literature of the period.

The introduction will help students new to modernism see how it is possible to situate a project against previous studies and scholarly debates. For Randall, the field's recent focus on space and place offers impetus for her own study of time, dailiness, and the temporal. As a person who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on geographies of modernism in Joyce, Woolf, and Nella Larsen, I appreciate Randall's purpose in balancing the spatial with an examination of the temporal in early-twentieth-century fiction. Her book would have helped me to articulate a stronger answer to a question posed during my defense: "Very well about space, but what about time?" Randall has done substantial research mining seemingly every reference to time in the literature and theory from Marx to Bakhtin. Her project also situates itself amidst feminist debates over temporality, including Kristeva's discussion of women, linear time, and imaginary space.

Before turning to the study of her four selected women writers, Randall offers a chapter on cultural context, examining the perspectives of Henri Bergson and William James for their contributions to turn-ofthe-century notions of daily time, everyday life and, more interestingly, concepts of boredom, sameness, repetition, and duration. For instance, Randall reads the temporal experience of the daydream as "a site of resistance to imperatives of efficiency and productivity." Her discussion brings to mind—though she doesn't mention it—the first dinner scene at Oxbridge from A Room of One's Own; instead she compares the daydream to de Certeau's la perruque, "the 'stealing' of time and materials from the workplace." Thus, the daydream, as a state of the everyday, while "conventionally dismissed as passive, unproductive, and probably effeminate, might rather constitute an opportunity for an enriching of experience," and indeed Randall goes on to examine such states as they appear in Pilgrimage, "Melanctha," H.D.'s autobiographical novels, and Mrs. Dalloway, among other texts.

From a historical materialist perspective, the cultural moment of Randall's study is a rich one. The year 1884 witnessed the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time, Randall reminds us, "which indicated global interest in establishing an objective, measurable system of timekeeping, primarily to facilitate the expansion of travel and communication systems." Against such public developments Randall...