As one of the Cambridge critical concepts series, Time and Literature is a collection of essays authored by a group of scholars with different disciplinary background in the field of time studies. The volume deals with time’s inner intricacy, its intrinsic relations with literature, and its application in the understanding of other concepts. In “Introduction” (1–14), the editor Thomas M. Allen emphasizes the centrality of time in our experience of life. He thinks that literature can represent the intangible time as tangible and manipulable. By contextualizing time studies in literary criticism both as a critical interest with its origin back to the pre-Socratics and as a temporal turn in modern criticism, he argues that time is not only a theme or a property of literature, but also essential in understanding the nature of literature.Part I “Origins” (16–102) consists of six chapters and deals with the fundamental issues connecting time and literature. In Chapter 1, “Time and Aesthetics,” Michael W. Clune examines how time becomes the object of aesthetics by showing three types of aesthetics of time. As the aesthetics of the enduring world, literature has “time-defeating capacity” (18) in contrast with visual art or architecture. The aesthetics of timeless experience is achieved either by eternity in a religious way or by resisting the habit and restoring “a thing to its prehabituated status or to create an image itself resistant to habituation” (24) with the strategy of “defamiliarization” (24) in a literary way so as to create “permanent novelty” (25). The aesthetics of finitude, in contrast with the first two types, embraces the impermanence and finitude of time rather than resists the passage of time.Mark Currie’s essay “Reading in Time” (Chapter 2) draws the notion of “struggle” (31) from Paul Ricoeur, and elaborates how this notion can help to understand reading and literary interpretation. Given the struggle or tension between reading and experience, the process of reading is one of experiencing the “quasi-present” (33) in a text as if it is the present in our life. The “as if” notion of reading brings the interaction between an immediacy of the narrative past and a retrospectivity of the present experience. Currie argues that when we experience the quasi-present in narrative, we will anticipate a “future anteriority” (41).Rebecca Bushnell’s “Time and Genre” (Chapter 3) examines how the time of performance and the time represented in literature defines and shapes genre. By reviewing the history of genre theory, Bushnell shows how the temporal notions of duration, tense, open-endedness, heteroglossia, the presentation/representation have been used to define different genres. The lyric is defined by its “reading” nature, and it can “create a kind of new time” (49) so as to achieve “eternal present” (49) in the experience of time. Given the intimacy between time and genre, Bushnell argues that “the temporality we attribute to genres can influence our experience of the events in the world around us” (50–51), and change “the perception of change in human life and the world around us” (53).Matthew Wagner’s essay “Time and Theatre” (Chapter 4), a further elaboration on the relationship between time and genre, demonstrates how theater can perform, manipulate, and embody time. By noticing different theatrical manifestations of time, Wagner argues that theatre maintains the temporal paradox of both sameness and difference by performing diverse temporalities. This paradox creates the reiterative nature of time in theater. The iterative nature of performance brings both inevitability and impossibility of ending, and this makes continuity possible.Chapters 5 and 6 show how the different representations of futurity first differ in their religious and ecological meanings, and then gradually overlap to the extent that the distinction between sacred and secular gives away to that between Anthropocene and non-Anthropocene. Sue Zemka’s “Sacred and Secular” (Chapter 5) first delineates the change of futurity from antiquity to modern time in the different cultural traditions where future is given different religious and social meanings. The climate change and ecological crisis brings a new vision of future from a nonanthropocentric perspective, and blurs the distinction between the sacred and the secular. Probably, as a response to Zemka’s discussion of future, Tobias Menely’s “Ecologies of Time” (Chapter 6) examines how different biological and cosmic phenomena embody and materialize the multiple temporalities in our experience. In the Anthropocene age, human beings become “a major geological force” (93), the geohistorical time experiences a rupture, and the transitional present dominates modern perception of time. However, what becomes of the future remains controversial: some negate the progressive narrative, whereas others suggest that the same forces as described by Darwin might exist. Whatever the future might be, Menely suggests we should describe “time’s multiple forms” (97).While Part I deals with some of the fundamental issues of time, Part II “Development” explores how the external changes can bring new perspectives of time. Jocelyn Holland’s “Literature, Time, and Scientific Revolutions” (Chapter 7) engages the controversy concerning the impact of scientific revolution on literary representations of time with his focus on quantum fiction. Holland confirms that new scientific theories both confirm and challenge our intuitions of time, and argues the scientific concepts of observation in relativity, simultaneity, and superposition in quantum theory, and entropy in thermodynamics not only bridge literary and scientific thinking, but also generate a sense of crisis for the subject of a literary text through their literary representations.Nick Yablon’s “Untimely Objects: Temporal Studies and the New Materialism” (Chapter 8) discusses how different objects are used to materialize the once abstract temporality and challenges its singularity. “The interdisciplinary return to material objects” (124) contributes the most in advocating the multiplicity of temporality. Yablon suggests that we have to clarify our concepts of time and interrogate our own preoccupation with certain types of objects so that we can arrive a more general understanding of both time and material objects.Ian Maclanchlan’s “Temporalities of Writing: Time and Difference after Structuralism” (Chapter 9) investigates how the exclusion and inclusion of temporality in difference of signs marks the change from structuralism to deconstruction. Maclanchlan explains Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism as synchronic concerns by excluding the diachronic change. The elision of time in structuralism brings the reconsideration of linguistic temporality in Derrida. To quote de Man, Maclanchlan thinks différance denotes a time in which “diachrony is always about to collapse into the ironic self-reference of synchrony, and synchrony is about to split open and relayed across the temporal distance of diachrony” (143), thus a kind of “dia-synchrony” (147).In “Time and Media” (Chapter 10), J. K. Barret blurs the distinction between media as communication and media as artistic expression so as to highlight the value of time in distinguishing between different types of artistic media. He introduces the concept of “remediation” which means “the representation of one medium in another” (152), and shows how literature can transpose the contents from one medium to another. He argues that “literature trains focus as it experiments with the temporal capabilities and limitations that can be explored through the vocabularies and modes of distinct, even competing, media” (162).By emphasizing clocks as a sign of technological progress and “cultural signature” (166), Charles M. Tung in “Technology and Time: Clocks, Time Machines, and Speculation” (Chapter 11) offers insights into the inner intricacy of time in modernism. Tung thinks that modernism is “the poignant response to the resulting intensifications of ephemerality, simultaneity, and instantaneity” (167). Modernism’s cultural techniques of time-telling are related to clock’s mechanics of time-telling since both indicate the plurality of time. Tung argues that literature not only deals with the subject of time and explores temporal process, but also defamiliarizes the medium of time and represents alternative times.In “Historicism” (Chapter 12), Jeffrey Insko demonstrates how time is essential in defining historicism. He investigates how the changes of time challenge the underlying assumption of historicism. Defining historicism as historical turn in literary criticism, Insko thinks that historicism’s purpose is to historicize texts in “a sequence of discrete era” (182), and the meaning of a text is contained in a historical period when it is produced. Historicism views historical time as linear chronology, and explains “what we do and do not see” (185). However, modernism’s “nonsequential, asynchronous experience of time” (184) and the different ways of measuring and experiencing time challenges and undermines “the authority of normative time’s mechanical, plodding regularity” (186) in historicism, and invites us to reconsider historicity. To use the example of Washington Irving, Insko thinks time can be experienced by different people and in different objects. In this way, Insko argues that literary texts should jump out of the container of historicism.Part III “Application” focuses on the extrinsic studies of time, and explores the interactions between time and other concepts such as archive, empire, form, narration, race, gender, and queerness. As a further discussion on historicism, Michelle Sizemore’s “Time and the Literary Archive” (Chapter 12) focuses on historicism’s materialist embodiment in archive, and examines how the change of time-consciousness challenges the historical perception of archive, the archive’s historical objectivity, and the basic assumption of historicism. For Sizemore, the structure of archive embodies the empirical hermeneutics, and a new temporality of “the openness of the future and the alterity of the past” (200) from the second half of the eighteenth century onward challenges the historicism’s understanding of time. Sizemore proposes “a history mindful of simultaneous yet divergent histories” (204), and prefers presentism to historicism.Edward Larkin’s essay “Time, Empire, and Nation” (Chapter 14) discusses how the spatial and temporary connotations of “territory” indicate another form of empire in the United States. The US Department of the Interior defines territory as “unincorporated insular area” (212), and the temporal notion “unincorporated” and the spatial notion of “insular” avoids the burden of “an imperial identity” associated with colony (216). Thus, “territory” does not only indicate spatially an area to be incorporated, but also temporally “an alternate present that is always in the process of becoming a future” (222).Daylanne K. English’s chapter “Race, Writing, and Time” (Chapter 15) examines the function of time in race studies. Rather than suspending time in the discussion of race, English thinks that we should acknowledge time distinctiveness (227) in the context of temporal turn in race studies. Drawing Homi Bhabha’s concept of “time-lag” which indicates the “temporal multiplicity for the oppressed in modernity” (229), English shows that how “time-lag” disrupts the linear progression of time. As distinctive black time, time-lag can supplant the time in modernity, and determine the distinctiveness of race. English argues that the multiplicity of time indicated in time-lag shows the distinctiveness of black time, and undermines the myth of progress in modernity.In “Time and the Literature of Globalization” (Chapter 16), Adams Barrows demonstrates how globalization eliminates the limits of time. Globalization regards nonsynchronicity and temporal delay as the obstacles to progress and development, and views time as “moments arranged in a timeless configuration” (244) so that we can liberate ourselves from the temporal restrictions. This global fantasy of “a world without temporal barriers” (245) brings a great impact on environmental consciousness and responsibility, and the globalization challenging the nature time becomes “deglobed globalization” (246). Barrows uses David Mitchell’s novels to illustrate how literature can help to both create and reflect that fantasy of time.The question of time and narration is key to Chapter 17 and Chapter 18. Cindy Weinstein’s “Time and the Return to Form: Reading Nabokov Reading Poe” (Chapter 18) examines how Nabokov’s use of the conjunction “or,” which is adapted from the sounds in Poe’s oeuvre, reveals the rich implications in his works. Weinstein interprets the missing word between “a” and “time” in “I’m having a time” in Lolita as a gap, and assumes that “or” with rich signifying possibilities can best fill that gap. That gap indicates multiple temporalities and aesthetic possibilities. The narrator uses the rhythm created by “or” to represent “throb time,” and contains Lolita’s life into a form. Weinstein thinks the vibration effects produced by “or” connects incest, time, and language in Ada, or Ardor. Jesse Matz’s “Narrative and Narratology” (Chapter 18) also deals with the meaning of narrative forms. He examines the central role of time in the relation between linearity and diversity in narrative temporality on the one hand, and the social, historical, and metal significance of narrative engagement on the other. By using Ricoeur’s distinction between figuration, configuration, and refiguration, Matz argues that readers’ narrative engagement is essential in explaining the discrepancy between sequential linearity and temporal diversity. Matz suggests that instead of focusing “non-chronological concepts of time,” we have to “clarify the practical and dynamic engagements whereby linear emplotment responds to and then gives way to novel conceptions of time’s realities” (285).The last two chapters deal with the depressive temporalities in the contexts of gender and queerness. In Chapter 19 “Queer Temporalities: Space-ing Time and the Subject,” Michelle M. Wright thinks time inhibits queerness, and queers of noncolors benefit from the sacrifice of the color. In this way, queer body becomes the symbol of reproduction, and queer time changes from the time of waiting to the time of being stopped. Julia Emberley’s essay “In the Spiral of History: Gestational Temporalities and Indigenous Women’s Writings on the Knowledge of Sexual Difference” (Chapter 20), discusses how the recovery of indigenous knowledge can resist the Christian and Eurocentric progressive timeline of modernity. By recreating the image of the spiral time, the Indigenous writings interprets gestational time as “now-time” (307) where there is no past or future and all time is now (308). The gestational temporality establishes the thread of knowledge in the Indigenous social reproduction, and undermines the dominance of linear progress narratives.The book’s “Further Reading” and “Index” provide starting point for further studies. Though Thomas M. Allen explains that the three parts of this book are in “a flexible progression that tends toward an organic coherence” (6), a restructuring of some chapters will make the whole book more coherent. For instance, Chapters 17 and 18 can be relocated to Part I since the issues of narration and forms are fundamental in the relationship between time and literature. Furthermore, it is a pity that this book does not cover any chapters dealing with the metaphorical nature of time. The tangibility of intangible time is only possible through the process of metaphorisation. Nevertheless, this book has been the most comprehensive guide to time studies so far, and with its illuminating ideas on the interactions between time and literature, it provides a reference for those who intend to embark on the journey of time studies.