Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

Part I centers Italy in British heritage discourse, showing how nineteenth-century writers used Italy (especially Pompeii, Rome, and Florence) to redefine their own historical and political identities. Amid political resurgence and ongoing unification efforts, the long tradition in British writing of depicting Italy as culturally and politically dead faltered. In response to the Risorgimento, British writers deployed fractal and syncretism – two temporal forms that afford nonlinear historicisms. Rather than the timelines that locate Italy in a distant past, fractal and syncretism connect past and present. One result is a redefined political liberty that can transcend national, gender, class, and race boundaries, as I explore through forgotten transnational figures including the writer Susan Horner and the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond.

Chapter 5 explores how Harriet Martineau’s travel narrative Eastern Life, Present and Past and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Burden of Nineveh” organize time through ruins from the eastern Mediterranean. Eastern Life, which was criticized for its unorthodox historicization of Christianity, imagines how ruins themselves experience human empires across centuries. The temporal form of the ruin, Martineau shows, is a capacious present in which the revolutions of human religions and empires become insignificant. Rossetti’s poem, which focuses on ancient Assyrian relics arriving at the British Museum, similarly surrenders human duration to the ruin’s own temporality. For Rossetti, the museum’s attempts to redefine the ruin within its own linear historicism necessarily fail because the ruin has already proven its endurance through many changing imperial narratives. Both Rossetti’s and Martineau’s texts depict ruin as a temporal form that outlasts any empire’s claims to significance, challenging the centrality of human experience in time.

The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to recover and explore the region’s centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms “heritage discourse” – narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity – across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

Chapter 6 returns to William Thackeray’s Mediterranean travel writing to show how his humor fails to challenge the dominant heritage discourse in Jerusalem. Although Thackeray derides other Mediterranean sites for inauthenticity, he cannot profane Jerusalem, which means he cannot return it to human (and imperial) use, either by word play or physical contact. Anthony Trollope takes up this problem in his novel The Bertrams, in which he reconceives some places, like Alexandria, for modern use. These sites are wiped of their significance to British heritage discourse as ancient lands and rendered available for modernization. Jerusalem, though, proves too sacred, and thus too integral to British cultural heritage, to be colonized in the same way. Some holy sites thus endure as historical relics while others are rewritten as a “middle” East.

As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

Part II centers Greece within British cultural heritage discourse, asking how British narratives about Greece shift after the Greek wars for independence produce a modern nation to vie with Britain’s depiction of itself as cultural (and material) heir to classicism. The temporal forms I identify in this part – inheritance and irony – define Britain in relation to Greece, both historically and geopolitically. Across Part II, I consider Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, their display in the British Museum, the conspiracy to whiten them on the eve of World War II, and the claims of universal cultural heritage that began in the nineteenth century and still feature in their exhibition. These narratives and their trajectory, I argue, demonstrate how classicism develops in and through cultural and eventually racial supremacy.

Part III centers on eastern Mediterranean places loosely designated as the “Holy Land” in British heritage discourse. Sites in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were especially important within Christianity, generating new biblical historicisms in the face of geological deep time and a booming tourism industry. However, the same cultural heritage that underwrote British imperialism and articulated a mission to modernize the “East” maintained that some historically significant places should be preserved. This tension is central to the temporal forms of ruin and profanation, which I define in Part III. The desire to claim Eastern sites as the origin of Western culture conflicted with the simultaneous desire to distance current populations there as “Other.” Laying claim to the history of a place like Palmyra, an ancient Roman city in Syria still popular with Western observers, both complicated and facilitated the relationship with present life there.

The Mediterranean is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century British literature, but this study is the first to recover and explore the region’s centrality to Romantic and Victorian constructions of the past, the present, and the shape of time itself. Placing regions central to the making of Western cultural heritage, such as Italy and Greece, into context with one another and with European imperialism, Lindsey N. Chappell traces the contours of what she terms “heritage discourse” – narrative that constructs or challenges imperial identities by reshaping antiquity – across nineteenth-century British texts. Heritage discourse functions via time, and often in counterintuitive and paradoxical ways. If assertions of political, cultural, and eventually racial supremacy were the end of this discourse, then time was the means through which it could be deployed and resisted. Chappell shows how historical narratives intervened in geopolitics, how antiquarianism sparked scientific innovation, and how classical and biblical heritage shaped British imperialism.

Chapter 3 shows how British writers (including Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and Percy Shelley) grappled with the question of who owned classical Greek culture in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. With Greece long under rule by the Ottoman Empire, Britain wrote itself as ancient Greece’s culture heir. Inheritance was the temporal form that facilitated this transfer, not only of the succession of culture but also of material, as I show in British arguments surrounding Lord Elgin’s acquisition of marble relics from the Parthenon. I end by considering Greek antiquities in the British Museum and the attendant conflicts about universal cultural heritage they continue to engender.