The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature by Adam Barrows, and: Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society by Sue Zemka (review)

Time is having a moment. Besides the two studies reviewed here, a collection of essays edited by Trish Ferguson, Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (2013), was published earlier this year, and no doubt there is other work in this line that has not yet come my way. Whence this temporal turn? It may be in part a reaction against a period in which cultural theory has been more interested in space: as Adam Barrows notes, the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel de Certeau, among others, is largely spatial in its vocabulary and models. We might also speculate that greater levels of interest in Victorian science and technology underwrite this new field of interest, since it is not time in the abstract but modern, industrial, railway time that is most under consideration. But it is worth noting too that this emergent subfield represents a continuity, since these studies for the most part pursue topics that will already be familiar to readers of Victorian Studies: the impact of industrial modernity on the human sensorium, and the way that impact is registered in literature; the relations between knowledge and power, science and empire; and the transition from the Victorian to the modernist period.

Sue Zemka argues in Time and the Moment that the momentary grew more important to our thinking as industrial time wove itself into the fabric of everyday life. Modernity, in other words, has subjected us to a species of temporal training that has altered our conceptual range. In terms of the literary history that is her focus, Zemka argues that time discipline ultimately fosters a modernist aesthetics of solitary and momentary epiphanies, a weakening of the ability to represent duration and intersubjectivity, and a criticism that favors synecdochic interpretation. Chapter 1 takes us on a tour of nineteenth-century ideas about time and sensation and shows the ways in which nineteenth-century reception theory was underpinned by the associationist ideas of John Locke and Anthony Ashley Cooper (the seventh earl of Shaftesbury). Zemka argues that fiction moves away from a sentimental and intersubjective aesthetic based on readerly “effects,” as Martin Meisel has described, to one centered on the interpretation of symbolic moments (Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England [Princeton University Press, 1983], 69). This shift is complexly linked to the increasingly thin slicing of modern time by industrial capitalism, as well as by the revelation of the limits of embodied perception in psychometry and in Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography, for example. This long chapter does a lot of the book’s heavy lifting, and at times the strain shows: the relationship of some sections to the main argument is unclear, something acknowledged in such links as “To return to the basic point” (53). Subsequent chapters are shorter and more focused, and explore time and the novel from the mid-nineteenth century to 1900. Zemka tracks increasing time-consciousness, as well as resistance to it, through a range of familiar and less familiar novels, from penny dreadfuls to Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–41) to Daniel Deronda (1876) and Lord Jim (1899–1900). In a series of sophisticated and compelling readings, she illuminates, for instance, the macabre “literalization of abstract labor time” in Thomas Peckett Prest’s The String of Pearls (1846–47), the significance of momentary street encounters in Charles Dickens’s work, and the long durational time of Judaism in Daniel Deronda (95). In the final chapter, on Lord Jim, Zemka considers the dilated moments of Joseph Conrad’s proto-modernist vision, in which Marlow as narrator keeps attempting to freeze meaning in symbolic moments, something that Conrad himself seems to treat sceptically. The...