In her imaginative experiment in literary reflection, Artful (2012), Ali Smith toys with E. M. Forster's observation: ‘In a novel there is always a clock.’ This ‘annoying fact’, she observes, means ‘the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot’ (Smith 2013: 29). Artful, with its ghostly and ghosted re-enactment of lectures on literature conducted through the processes of memory and mourning, is itself an example of the elasticity Smith attributes to the short story form: ‘it can be as imagistic and as achronological as it likes and will still hold its form. In that it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment. At the same time it deals in, and doesn't compromise on, the purely momentary nature of everything, both timeless and transient’ (Smith 2013: 29). The novel, by contrast, is ‘bound to and helplessly interested in society […] and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed in the trappings of its time’. It is ‘bound to be linear […] even when it seems to or attempts to deny linearity’ (Smith 2013: 29). Yet Smith is one of a number of Scottish women novelists who have butted against Forster's ‘annoying’ assertion that ‘It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel’ (Smith 2013: 32). In fiction by Kate Atkinson, A. L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Louise Welsh relationships between past, present and future are challenged by the reshaping of narrative linearity and through a broader engagement with the forces of history and change.

These writers are not alone in their preoccupation with temporality. There has been a growing fashion in fiction and film for playing with time, creating alternative chronologies and parallel narratives. In cinema, Sliding Doors (1998) offers an early instance; About Time (2013) a more recent one.