The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature

Abstract

Arenewed, expansive reckoning of the relationship between modernism and imperialism has long been gathering momentum. More and more, literary scholarship has complicated the Lukácsian notion of modernist apoliticism, showing how modernists were not wholly divorced from questions of empire. Critics like Kathy J. Phillips have explored references to militarism and imperialism in the works of Virginia Woolf, once the embodiment of aesthetic ahistoricism. More recently, Jed Esty has mined the links between empire, nationhood, and the narrative temporality of the modernist Bildungsroman.1 Published just weeks after Esty's book, Adam Barrows's The Cosmic Time of Empire examines some of the same authors and shares a similar focus on ‘imperial time’. His unique contribution, though, pivots on the apparatus of temporal reckoning itself: Greenwich Mean Time. Studying its history as one of homogenisation and imperial control, he finds some fascinating political and aesthetic ramifications for a host of British and Indian modernists alike. The Cosmic Time of Empire is a dense and conceptually ambitious work that demonstrates how writers ‘engaged with rather than evaded the enlistment of temporality in the imperial project’ (p. 4). Moreover, drawing on history and the philosophy of science, and encompassing neglected as well as canonical transatlantic authors, it advances scholarship on modernist temporality with admirable methodological breadth.

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