Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature

Temporality and Progress in Victorian Literature argues that Victorian literature uses traces of a lingering past to theorize time as non-progressive and discontinuous.For decades, the dominant view in Victorian studies has been that the period’s economic, political, and intellectual developments led to a broad sense that time was defined by continuous improvement—and that this masternarrative of progress was evident across Victorian writings.McAdams contributes to a broader scholarly challenge of this thesis by considering how the irregular life-cycles of individuals and objects undermine Victorian progress.Unfashionable waistcoats, aging courtesans, and remembered conversations in Victorian literature instead reveal numerous alternative conceptions of time theorized against the emerging dominance of a progress narrative.The book uncovers the heterogenous shapes of time imagined by Victorian literature—regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture.These shapes are not simply progress’s others, but rather constituent elements of progress’s theorization.