Victorian time : technologies, standardizations, catastrophes

Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes is a collection of essays that reflect on how the literature of the Victorian era engaged with new ways of thinking about time. These essays examine how Victorian fiction registers the psychological adjustment involved in keeping pace with industrial time as time-saving technologies aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time. Examining canonical realist novels, popular literature and science fiction, these essays reveal an often ambivalent and complex response to the onset of 'industrial time' and the birth of a modern time-consciousness. Documenting the era's literary responses to the impact and rate of industrial progress and the potentialities of technology these essays trace the Victorians' radical shift in time perception from industrial novels at the onset of industrialization through to fin de siecle narratives of dystopia and apocalypse.