Hostname: page-component-77c78cf97d-hf2s2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-24T03:28:00.996Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Slow Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jonathan Sachs
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay identifies a tension between speed and slowness that emerged circa 1800, when a self-conscious awareness of seemingly rapid social change intersected with the enhanced understanding of slowness developing in geological theory. Focusing on Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Charlotte Smith, the essay shows how Romantic poetry and geology think together about slow time and incongruous temporality. Slow time raises formal problems about how to represent temporal processes that operate below the level of the visual and the tangible. he slow time of geology ultimately offered Romantic poetry a new sense of how an apparent lack of eventfulness can be understood as eventful when placed on a longer timeline. Romantic poetry, in turn, drew in fine detail on geology's expanded scales of temporality to offer an imaginative understanding of the infinitesimal rates of change and the gradual processes central to slow time.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 315 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets, and Politics. Routledge, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2nd ed., edited by Allot, Kenneth and Allot, Miriam, Longman, 1979, pp. 254–57.Google Scholar
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time. 2nd ed., Verso, 2010.Google Scholar
Berg, Maggie, and Seeber, Barbara. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bewell, Alan. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment. Yale UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Bode, Christopher. “The Subject of ‘Beachy Head.‘” Charlotte Smith and British Romanticism, edited by Labbe, Jacqueline, Pickering and Chatto, 2008, pp. 57–70.Google Scholar
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. Harcourt Brace, 1947.Google Scholar
Brower, Reuben. “Reading in Slow Motion”. In Defense of Reading: A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism, edited by Brower, and Poirier, Richard, Dutton, 1962, pp. 3–21.Google Scholar
Burkett, Andrew. Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism. State U of New York P, 2016.Google Scholar
Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Connell, Philip. Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of Culture. Oxford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Cox, Jeffrey. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle. Cambridge UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition. Harvard UP, 1964.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, Edward. The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald. Edited by Alfred McKinley Terhune and Annabelle Burdick Terhune, vol. 1, Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Fry, Paul. Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. Yale UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, Kevis. “Conjectures on ‘Beachy Head’: Charlotte Smith's Geological Poetics and the Ground of the Present”. ELH, vol. 81, no. 3, 2014, pp. 983–1006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Harvard UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Gurton-Wachter, Lily. Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Stanford UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula. Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Heringman, Noah. “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.” Representations, no. 129, Winter 2015, pp. 56–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heringman, Noah. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Cornell UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Heringman, Noah. “‘Very Vain Is Science's Proudest Boast’: The Resistance to Geological Theory in Early Nineteenth-Century England”. Geological Society of America Memoir, vol. 203, 2009, pp. 247–57.Google Scholar
Honoré, Carl. In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.Google Scholar
Jack, Ian. Keats and the Mirror of Art. Clarendon Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Jacobus, Mary. Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. U of Chicago P, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Keats's Poetry and Prose, edited by Cox, Jeffrey N., W.W. Norton, 2008, pp. 461–62.Google Scholar
Kelley, Theresa. “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and ‘Beachy Head.‘” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 59, 2004, pp. 281–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. MIT Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Langan, Celeste, and McLane, Maureen. “The Medium of Romantic Poetry”. The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, edited by Chandler, James and McLane, , Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 239–62.Google Scholar
Levinson, Marjorie. Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Blackwell Publishing, 1998.Google Scholar
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. U of Chicago P, 1966.Google Scholar
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. Edited by Secord, James, Penguin Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. vol. 1, London, 1830.Google Scholar
McGurl, Mark. “The Posthuman Comedy”. Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, 2012, pp. 533–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLane, Maureen. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2008.Google Scholar
McPhee, John. Basin and Range. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.Google Scholar
Mikics, David. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Belknap Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. U of Chicago P, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. Jonathan Cape, 1973.Google Scholar
Quincey, Thomas de. “Suspiria de Profundis.” Articles from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 1844–46, edited by Burwick, Frederick, Pickering and Chatto, 2003, pp. 126–204. Vol. 15 of The Works of Thomas de Quincey.Google Scholar
Roe, Nicholas, editor. Keats and History. Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. translated by Trejo-Mathys, Jonathan, Columbia UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosa, Hartmut. “The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics”. New Political Science, vol. 27, no. 4, 2005, pp. 445–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudwick, Martin. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. U of Chicago P, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudwick, Martin. Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. U of Chicago P, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. UP of New England, 1994.Google Scholar
Secord, James. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. U of Chicago P, 2014.Google Scholar
Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. U of Chicago P, 2006.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Edited by Bryce, J.C., Liberty Fund, 1985.Google Scholar
Smith, Charlotte. “Beachy Head”. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, edited by Curran, Stuart, Oxford UP, 1993, pp. 217–51.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Christopher Ricks, vol. 2, U of California P, 1987, pp. 304–459.Google Scholar
Virilio, Paul. The Virilio Reader. Edited by Derian, James Der, Blackwell Publishing, 1998.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review. Verso, 1981.Google Scholar
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, with Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art. translated by Fusseli, Henry, A. Miller and T. Cadell, 1767.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “Nutting.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 196–98.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 205–11.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “Old Man Travelling.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 106–07.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. Preface. Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 241–72.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “A slumber did my spirit seal.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, p. 154.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 105–06.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William, and Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Lyrical Ballads. 2nd ed., edited by Brett, R.L. and Jones, A.R., Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Virginia. Excavating Victorians. State U of New York P, 2007.Google Scholar