Out of Time: Alternative Temporalities from Victorian Literature

Abstract

The Victorians popularized of the idea of progress as well as the linear and unidirectional temporality that this concept implies. However, the problematic nature of progressive temporality is now more visible than ever. New research about climate change has changed our understanding of the planet’s recent geological history from a exhortation of humanity’s achievement to a condemnation of humanity’s destruction. This destruction has been enabled in part by the progressive ideologies that drove nineteenth-century capitalism’s insatiable exploitation of the Earth’s resources. My dissertation argues that, even as a progressive idea of time became a dominant temporal form throughout Victorian culture and society, authors experimented with different temporalities in various literary forms. I investigate these alternative temporal forms and I argue that, though these alternatives died out in the past, their latent intellectual infrastructure, which was preserved within various literary forms, can be revitalized.This research contributes to a growing body of research that reevaluates narratives of progress during the Victorian era. While other works, such as Elisha Cohn’s Still Life, examine scenes within Victorian novels that disrupt capitalist development, my dissertation shows how this narrative of development and alternatives to it were thought through and experimented with in different literary forms. I include a study of two different novels, a work of prose nonfiction, and a pair of dramas written primarily in verse. Grouping this collection of works together gives a better understanding of the alternative temporalities that were experimented with during the Victorian period and which became a central focus in the Modernist literature that followed. Additionally, my project contributes to a growing field of Anthropocene studies. In the examples of nineteenth century literature that I discuss, I argue that we find a possible answer to questions raised by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty and many others about the place of the human in a rapidly-changing ecosystem by reconsidering the temporality that has inform the structure of our thought. I believe that, within the nineteenth century and elsewhere in our past, alternative possibilities of our present lie latent and waiting to be awakened.