Victorian Time Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes

Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes is a collection of essays that reflect on how the literature of the Victorian era engaged with new ways of thinking about time. These essays examine how Victorian fiction registers the psychological adjustment involved in keeping pace with industrial time as time-saving technologies aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time. Examining canonical realist novels, popular literature and science fiction, these essays reveal an often ambivalent and complex response to the onset of "industrial time" and the birth of a modern time-consciousness. Documenting the era's literary responses to the impact and rate of industrial progress and the potentialities of technology these essays trace the Victorians' radical shift in time perception from industrial novels at the onset of industrialization through to fin de siècle narratives of dystopia and apocalypse.

TRISH FERGUSON is a lecturer in the School of English at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Educated at Trinity College Dublin, she is an expert on Victorian literature and culture.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; T.Ferguson
The Best of Time, The Worst of Time: Temporal Consciousness in Dickens; D.Downes
Emptying Time in Anthony Trollope's The Warden; K.Killeen
Hardy's Wessex and the Birth of Industrial Subjectivity; T.Ferguson
'You Are Too Slow': Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days; J.S.Carroll
'Brave New Worlds': Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Settler Colonialism and New Zealand Mean Time; J.McDonnell
'Primitive Man' and Media Time in H.M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent; B.H.Murray
'The Honest Application of the Obvious': The Scientific Futurity of H.G.Wells; M.Link
'The End of Time': M.P. Shiel and the 'Apocalyptic Imaginary'; A. Bulfin
'Gone Into Mourning...For the Death of the Sun': Victorians at the End of Time; D.Jones
Bibliography
Index