MODERNISM AND TIME MACHINES

Many works of modernist literature and art aspired to the condition of time machines. While an early phase of modernism's history contains the first appearance of such a device in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), the aesthetic experiments that we typically associate with the singular noun ‘modernism’ have not been considered in relation to this foundational science-fiction trope or its numerous offshoots burgeoning through our cultural landscape today. Yet if we reflect on what many of the most famous texts and paintings were doing in form and theme, it is clear that the modernist aesthetic called attention to itself not only as a vehicle for experiencing and moving in time, but also as a technique for rethinking that experience and movement. Moreover, modernist experiments often sought self-consciously to question and reconceptualise time by foregrounding the ways in which their own devices, often in concert with psychological, social and historical mechanisms, structured and produced time. Modernism was itself, in many hithertounconsidered senses of the phrase, a time machine.

By reading modernism as a peculiar kind of time machine, this book seeks to expand our sense of both the well-known obsession with time at the beginning of the twentieth century and the popular trope of the time machine. Modernism and Time Machines argues that the fascination with time in canonical works of literature and art should be reframed alongside the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories, because both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction (hereafter SF) have been able to produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together these strands of what was once considered as ‘high’ art and ‘low’ popular culture can now be seen to form part of a larger network whose primary function is the defamiliarisation of time itself.