Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn

Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature.  Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature’s ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces.  Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature’s “chronometric imaginary”: its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

“This is a thoroughly remarkable book. … Barrows’s approach clearly demonstrates that geo-criticism, combined with textual analysis that is spatial, is up to the task of making apparent complex spatial and temporal configurations in literary narratives.” (Heike Polster,Kronoscope, Issue 20, 2020)

“Elegantly written, genial, while never sacrificing analytical precision, this book will convince its readers about the need to reconsider time. With sophisticated commentaries on theories of time and nuanced readings of proto-, high-, and late-modernist texts, Barrows shows how time fashions space and, in doing so, presents a more integrated way of reading the twentieth century in general.” (Stephen Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Warwick, UK)

"An essential contribution to the contemporary analysis of time across the humanities and social sciences. By focusing on the complex historical relationship between time and space, Barrows reveals with stunning insight how the temporalities of modern literature emerge from time’s struggle with the geographic ground of colonialism and globalization.” (Thomas Allen, Associate Professor of English, University of Ottawa, Canada and author of A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination inNineteenth-Century America)

“Through an impressively wide range of penetrating readings, Barrows offers not only strikingly original perspectives on individual texts, but breaks new ground in our understanding of what he calls the ‘chronometric imaginary’ of the literature of the last century.” (Bryony Randall, Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow, UK)

Adam Barrows is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Canada.  He is the author of The Cosmic Time of Empire and a recipient of the Modern Fiction Studies Margaret Church Memorial Prize.