Introduction: Queer Moments and Eddies in Time

Abstract

In the introduction to Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time, Haffey claims that the recent work regarding queer temporality owes a debt to the experimentations of literary modernists like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein. As such, Haffey argues that modernist temporalities persist throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and can be seen not only in queer theory but also in the work of contemporary authors like Michael Cunningham, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter, and Eve Sedgwick. In the course of making her argument, Haffey describes the recent trends in queer temporality as they have arisen in the past two decades and locates the book’s arguments within this emerging discourse.