This book argues that time travel fiction is a narrative "laboratory," a setting for thought experiments in which essential theoretical questions about storytelling--and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity--are represented in the form of literal devices and plots. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, the book links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from evolutionary biology in the late 1800s, through relativity and quantum physics in the mid-20th...

This book argues that time travel fiction is a narrative "laboratory," a setting for thought experiments in which essential theoretical questions about storytelling--and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity--are represented in the form of literal devices and plots. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, the book links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from evolutionary biology in the late 1800s, through relativity and quantum physics in the mid-20th...

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the many dimensions of the problem of scale, with essays that range in subject matter from literature, film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. It argues that in a globalized era with impossibly accelerating demands for textual competency and the vast availability of digital texts, literary studies must adapt by applying quantitative methods rather than close reading. The essays also look at literary maximalism and writing that provides a multiplicity of voices and plots to aspire to...