About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time

Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of arguments and readings, he offers an account of narrative as both anticipation and retrospection, linking fictional time experiments (in Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift) to exhilarating philosophical themes about presence and futurity. This is an argument that shows that narrative lies at the heart of modern experiences of time, structuring the present, whether personal or collective, as the object of a future memory as much as it records the past.

Author: Mark Currie
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 10/12/2010
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780748642465

About the Author

Mark Currie is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His previous publications include Difference (Routledge, 2004), Postmodern Narrative Theory (Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2011) and Metafiction (Longman 1995).