Cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism: these characteristics of the 1870s are exemplified by Harley Granville-Barker’s edited collection of essays, The Eighteen-Seventies (1929), which offers a nostalgic, aristocratic, Oxbridge, and high-culture account of this decade. But this present collection, in the spirit of the series to which it belongs, frames the 1870s as a decade in transition, and seeks to unsettle its conventional associations while acknowledging their force and legacy. Indeed, writers of the 1870s were especially adept at questioning their current temporal moment, often betraying an overdetermined sense of their place in time, and even of temporality itself.

This chapter argues that the 1870s witnessed the final hegemony of a cause-and-effect form of thick temporality that arguably still dominates our lives. It asks if digital tools open up alternative ways of thinking about chronology, our experience of time, and the possibility of action. The chapter examines two digital projects that change how we approach the 1870s: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History or BRANCH at branchcollective.org, and Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education or COVE at covecollective.org.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

This introduction sets out the aims and approach of the book. Following an introduction to the Norwegian post-war reckoning and a review of the existing literature on the topic, it argues that only an analysis of the full time span of the trials can uncover their complex dynamics and the changing positions of their key actors over time. The introduction then sets out the analytical framework of the book, which is to explore the – at times competing – legal and political rationales of the trials in face of a rapidly changing political and social climate.

This chapter deals with the methodological procedures of a CA study by tracking the development of a collection of instances of a multimodal practice and its variants. We describe the development of a study of the use of the German formats darf/kann ich…? (‘may/can I…?’; Deppermann & Gubina, 2021). Requesters use this format to ask if they may/can perform some embodied action while already starting or even fully performing it before the requestee’s confirmation. We first describe the process of sampling candidate cases to create a collection allowing us to identify a certain practice. Second, we describe how we analyzed (i) the time course of embodied action and its relationship to participants’ talk, (ii) the relationship the linguistic turn format, the sequential position and the multimodal context of the turn, and (iii) the relationship between situated action formation, linguistic design, action types, and interactional properties of a practice. Finally, we stress the importance of applying various strategies of comparative analysis and analytic induction to a larger dataset. We also discuss attending to the multimodal formation of social action on the basis of video data and multimodal transcripts is crucial for our understanding and analysis of face-to-face interaction.

This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.

This chapter examines the temporal texturing of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. Unlike the Aeneid, the Argonautica is not tied to a specific political project, but it uses epic and specifically Homeric narrative models more allusively to shape its reader’s experience of the world. Focusing on Orpheus’ cosmogonic song, the ecphrasis of the Acherousian headland, and then the consequences of desire as felt by Medea, Phillips draws attention to the small moments of temporal shaping within the Argonautica – how time is experienced by the characters and the readers on the level of the individual line, phrase and even word – which contain the many perspectives offered by Apollonius on navigating the burden of living as a subject of history.

The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

Global history stands out by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. As they put forms and structures of ‘global integration’ centre stage, global historians have not only made statements about the direction of history the foundation of how they define their area of study; they also ascribe at least partial explanatory power to them. The chapter argues that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on how global historians construe historical change over time. It delves into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and presents responses global histories may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. It also discusses the dialectics involved in processes of global integration and offers the outlines of a global history more attuned to the (unrealised) expectations and ‘futures pasts” among historical actors and to historical uncertainties produced under the impact of global interconnection. While the directionality/teleology problem poses particular challenges for global historians, it also can help think about multiple ‘guiding scripts’ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

Attending to the multitude of temporal markers found in Clare’s poetry, this essay argues that his representation of time and his thematic and stylistic experimentation with temporality demonstrate his pivotal place in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring-class poetry. Finding, having, and protecting time to write – asserting writing as an activity (whether conceived of as ‘work’ or as a pastime) for which one could have or take the time – was fundamental for Clare, his predecessors, and successors, to publish at all. Examining the burgeoning awareness of what E. P. Thompson has named ‘work-time discipline’, the essay traces how awareness and time anxiety impacts artistic self-fashioning for poets such as Robert Dodsley, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Bloomfield among others. However, Clare’s work remains an important point of transition for understanding how plebeian poets shaped their artistic identities within increasingly constraining notions of work.

The search for the causes of disease is an obvious central step in the pursuit of better health through disease prevention. In the previous chapters we looked at how we measure health (or disease) and how we look for associations between exposure and disease. Being able to identify a relation between a potential cause of disease and the disease itself is not enough, though. If our goal is to change practice or policy in order to improve health, then we need to go one step further and decide whether the relation is causal because, if it is not, intervening will have no effect. As in previous chapters, we discuss causation mainly in the context of an exposure causing disease but, as you will see when we come to assessing causation in practice, the concepts apply equally to a consideration of whether a potential preventive measure really does improve health.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

This chapter examines the origins and style of the early English essay, in order to consider the peculiarities of the form. The first section discusses the vexed origins of the English essay, which arrived on the literary scene both as an innovation, and as a continuation of older forms of moral discourse. It argues that essays were characterised by a paradoxical relationship to temporality, affecting both how the form began, and its style, in representing thought and thinking. Examining the style of essays by Francis Bacon, William Cornwallis, Nicholas Breton, Owen Felltham, and John Hall, the chapter uncovers a tension between flow and stasis, evident in punctuation and the structure of sentences. Rather than taking this to signal two distinct styles of the early English essay, associated respectively with Montaigne and Bacon, the chapter argues that it is the tension that is characteristic, oscillating between the representation of deliberation and decision.

This envoi looks at the impossible necessity of literary history. It explores the term ‘literary’, marking how it both opens ancient writing to scrutiny and obscures significant sets of connections or ideas, and it questions how narratives of the history of literature are always unfinished, partial and ideologically laden. It discusses the place of literary history within the field of classics.