Saving Time: Nineteenth-Century Time Travel and the Temporal Logic of Late Capitalism

Abstract

Fin-de-siècle time travel narratives do not only reflect their own historical moment, but they also anachronistically provide a theory of twenty-first-century capitalism. Using F. Anstey's 1891 novel Tourmalin's Time Cheques as a case study, this essay argues that these time travel narratives demonstrate a concern with the temporality of finance capitalism. By associating time travel with interest-bearing capital, narratives like Anstey's use temporal paradoxes to excavate capitalism's teleological logic. Time travel narratives also offer ways of rethinking current critiques of twenty-first-century capitalism, which often participate in capitalism's teleological logic. Anstey's novel exposes the ways in which capitalism produces a longing for unrecoverable origins, thereby necessitating a particular temporal experience. The time travel narrative, I argue, reveals and denaturalizes this capitalist temporal structure.