Introduction: Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarisation of Time

Abstract

This introduction returns to modernism’s incipient moments as the “Jonbar hinge” or pivot point for an alternative history of the period’s well-known time fixation. Using Lefebvre to reconsider aestheticism and impressionism in light of multiplicity rather than ephemerality, this new time-story expands the cultural significance and function of Wells’s foundational trope of the time machine to show how twentieth-century culture was defined not just by a Bergsonian repudiation of the clock but also by a proliferation of clocks. The rise of the time-travel trope, from the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, can be reconsidered not only as a symptom of the “eternal present” of late capitalism or our lost sense of history, but also as a component in a larger network that produces heterochrony—time’s multiple rates, scales, and reference frames. Our current political desire to revise history and envision other histories in contemporary discourses connects to the century-wide imaginative contestation of historical progress and the earlier openness to history’s irregular rhythms, its variety of scales, and its divarication of branches.