UCLA

Before, during, and after the long Romantic era, Europe experimented with new technological modes of measuring and telling time with clock and calendar: Thomas Tompion, the “Father of English Watchmaking,” manufactured thousands of timepieces in the 1700s, Britain erased eleven days from the calendar in the 1750s, France turned back the hands of time to Year One in the 1790s, and the British Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time in the 1840s. At the same moment, English poets from a broad range of backgrounds were developing new poetic strategies of anachronism (in its literal, etymological sense of “against time”) to contest the increasing dominance of what I call “imperial time”: the new clock-based, machine-regulated, and strictly standardized temporality used to enforce a forward-moving narrative of empire. My research highlights the central role of poetry in asserting a new chronopolitics that enacts powerfully untimely rhythms in order to reform entrenched cultural and economic institutions.

Historical and historicist works from the eighteenth century to the present portray anachronism as the sign of error and backwardness. “After Time” alternatively argues that intentional anachronism is neither the emblem of indefensible inaccuracy nor the mark of cultural primitivism. Rather than opposing anachronism to history, my dissertation historicizes anachronism. Revising instead of abandoning history, the poems of Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Benger, Joanna Southcott, and Lucy Aikin build alternative feminist traditions out of the new imperialist teleologies that tied tropes of chronological progress to the Garden of Eden and the feminization of culture. By comparison, both new transatlantic anthologies of fugitive pieces and the more urbane occasional verses of Horace Walpole and Lord Byron defy this new time program by variously relating ephemeral scraps and fading inks to a series of fleeting figures: juvenile poetasters, fugitive slaves, and queer cosmopolitans. The works of William Wordsworth and John Clare, by contrast, connect an increasingly obsolete sense of local, agrarian time with circular and belated lyric temporalities. Finally, the epics and odes of William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley move after time—beyond anachronism and toward timelessness—in order to explore the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of eternity. Taken together, these writers offer us new ways of understanding the power of poetic form to reshape time’s binds.