Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility by Amit S. Yahav

Abstract

MLR, .,   translations. Another useful, informative essay by Mario Dorigatti brings out the significance of Antonio Panizzi’s nineteenth-century edition, the first to combine Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and its sequel, Ariosto’s poem. Two outstanding essays, well argued, precisely focused, and fully in control of their materials, are Tobias Gregory’s ‘Milton and Ariosto’ and Tim Carter’s discussion of ‘Ariosto on the th-Century Opera Stage’, with particular attention to Handel. Carter’s ‘Lessons in Madness’ shows in consistently interesting detail ‘how the Orlando Furioso was read over three centuries’ as well as illustrating some of the problems of turning a poem into ‘mimetic drama’ (pp. , ). Gregory’s essay is one of the few in the volume that treats its materials analytically, giving a sense of what Ariosto is like as a poet and showing how Milton both resembles and differs from Ariosto in passages indebted to the earlier author. Two other valuable essays, Andrew Hiscock on Ariosto ‘among the Elizabethans’ (p. ) and Susan Oliver on Walter Scott and Orlando furioso, are stimulating and informative, without fully realizing the potential of their materials. Hiscock provides ample evidence to demonstrate how widely Ariosto’s poem was known during the Elizabethan period, a treasure trove for anyone who wants to know how the poem is echoed or reflected in English plays, poems, madrigals, and the visual arts during this period. But the essay resembles a catalogue of details, in which the treatment of a single Dutch tapestry maker is roughly as long as the treatment of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. One surprising omission in the volume is that there is no essay on Spenser and Ariosto, no attempt to give detailed consideration to the poet most significantly influenced by the Italian. Oliver’s essay is full of interesting quotations from Scott to show that ‘Ariosto was his favourite poet’, instrumental from an early age ‘in directing the turn of my imagination to the chivalrous and romantic in poetry and prose’ (pp. –). But though the chapter argues that the influence of Ariosto is pervasive in Scott’s poems as well as in the Waverley novels, there could be more detail on how Scott’s method of narrative draws on the characteristic entrelacement of Orlando furioso in ‘connecting the branches of [the] story’ (p. , quoted by Jossa). Jossa’s fine essay shows how Ariosto turns up in surprising places in works by British writers—for example, David Lodge’s comic novel Small World. U  L W C Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility. By A S. Y. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. .  pp. $.;£. ISBN ––––. Amit S. Yahav’s Feeling Time tackles a problem that has absorbed eighteenthcentury authors and contemporary dorm-room philosophers alike: does time exist; and if so, how do we know whether it is the same for everyone? A conventional understanding of Enlightenment approaches to time holds that it was in this period—with the increased accessibility of clocks and watches, the rise of recurrent publications such as newspapers and periodicals, and the eventual introduction of  Reviews factory routines—that a modern sense of linear, external time took hold. However, Yahav shows how a variety of writers focused on duration as a personal, embodied experience that was simultaneously shared, given that (they theorized) humans possessed innate capacities of rhythm, pulse, and language that created patterns of temporal experience. As she writes, ‘these eighteenth-century discussions identify felt duration as the crux of aesthetic pleasure and judgment, experiences described more as patterned durational activities than as static states’ (p. ). Focusing in particular on how this version of temporality interacts with novel writing and reading, Yahav identifies a ‘sensibility chronotope’ within which ‘what we do, how we feel, and who we are, are all questions that have everything to do with the temporality of our existence, and the temporality of our existence has everything to do with the way our experiences are composed into sensible patterns’ (p. ). Novels provide space for ‘off-the-clock’ leisure reading, offering ‘pauses for alternative duration’ (p. ). In this way, Yahav’s exploration of modes of qualitative duration contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about the...