Chapter 2 is a meditation on the general conditions of our intercourse with the past, especially as engaged by its material forms, whether in buildings, artworks, literary works or musical works. Distinctions between the forms are of course necessary but, it is argued, continuities remain: the mute testimony of the material object concerning the agents of its creation; the role of the viewer or reader in realising the work; the hand of the editor-conservator; and the role of time in its successive forms of existence.

Lydia Goehr’s history of the work-concept in music is pushed further and the dilemma of conservation, witnessed by the restored Teatro La Fenice (Phoenix Theatre) in Venice, is explored. The work-concept emerges as a regulative idea rather than a transcendent ideal form.

All wars are fought under constraints. Wars for limited aims generally suffer from more numerous and intent constraints because the value of the political objective sought tends to be lower, and thus states will often do less and pay less for a shorter time. The most important constraints are the value of the enemy’s political objective, time, internal public opinion, the international political environment (which usually means third-party nations with an interest in your war), geography, and the military means (which includes nuclear weapons). Military and political leaders need to understand how these constraints affect their ability to fight and win the war, and they must also determine whether the constraints are actual or self-imposed, and, if they are self-imposed, whether or not they are wise. The constraints are examined via examples from the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq Wars.

How long is the history of globalization? Most scholars would now agree that the sense of living in a world-space—a space conceived of as global—existed centuries before modern science projected a planet moving around the sun in the relative blackness of space. Different senses of the global go back much further than most casual commentators would allow. Certainly, they go back before the common myth that it was Copernicus who first argued that an erstwhile flat Earth should be understood as a planet. Hence, as we have begun to outline in earlier chapters, the processes of globalization through which the world-as-known became global need to be defined in terms of the historically variable ways in which they have been practiced and socially lived. This chapter questions earlier forms of periodization of globalization and sets out to map the dominant forms of globalization across world history from its earliest embodied beginnings as human settlement stretched across the planet to the relativizing upheaval of the present when globalization is now associated with a Great Unsettling.

In this chapter, the author goes through the different ways in which spatial terminology is mapped onto the abstract phenomenon of time, discussing the role of the grammatical cases and the use of prepositions as well as the more ornate descriptions. The author first discusses the moving ego metaphor ("we're approaching Christmas"), before discussing the metaphor whereby time approaches the ego ("Christmas is coming"), and that whereby time is figured simply as a sequence without an ego ("Christmas is before Easter"). He then discusses the question of whether the Greeks envisioned the future as "behind" them (and argues that they did not), before considering further metaphors for time.

The seasons are one of the most prevalent means by which literary texts engage with and represent climate. This chapter explores the implications of the seasonal perspective of climate, and argues that literary texts have used the seasons as a domain for interrogating the interface between nature and culture. The first half of the chapter traces a history of literary representations of the seasonal cycle. This climate model of change-within-constancy has been interpreted variously as a source of reassuring stability or as evidence for nature’s hostility. The second half of the chapter focuses on individual seasons and the cultural associations that have accumulated around them. Particular seasons are associated with particular human activities, emotions, psychological states, and literary genres. Often the most interesting examples of seasons literature are those texts that interrogate these associations and ask whether nature or culture has shaped our responses to and expectations for each season.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.

This chapter is prompted by recent calls by historians and other scholars for new understandings of history in the Anthropocene; it asks what this might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in the depiction of the passing of time. History in the Anthropocene renders redundant the human-historical, individual-universal dialectic that has long been the hallmark of the realist novel. Following Ian Baucom, this chapter looks to Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of history for clues to a new form of literary realism. For Benjamin, a true understanding of history demands the recognition of the ‘image’ of history, a recognition occurring in a moment of ‘arrest’ or stoppage in the flow of time and of thought. This chapter speculates on the emergence in the Anthropocene of a literary realism that performs just such an arrest, taking its reader beyond conventional understandings of (human) history and time.