Enriching our understanding of the connection between science and literature, Forms of Time, Newton to Austen offers the rise of the novel as a case study to examine the relationship between transformations in culture and transformations in literary forms. Through incisive readings of works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others, Molesworth reveals that the novel arose by making visible what culture does not or cannot see itself. The emergent "realist" novel did not adopt Newtonian claims wholesale. While the novel accommodated the new physicalist sense of "absolute time" in theme, its formal techniques offered something else: an escape, however temporary, from the claims made by Newtonian time.
Enriching our understanding of the connection between science and literature, Forms of Time, Newton to Austen offers the rise of the novel as a case study to examine the relationship between transformations in culture and transformations in literary forms. Through incisive readings of works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others, Molesworth reveals that the novel arose by making visible what culture does not or cannot see itself. The emergent "realist" novel did not adopt Newtonian claims wholesale. While the novel accommodated the new physicalist sense of "absolute time" in theme, its formal techniques offered something else: an escape, however temporary, from the claims made by Newtonian time.

Forms of Time, Newton to Austen
264
Forms of Time, Newton to Austen
264Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781503643567 |
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Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
Publication date: | 04/28/2026 |
Pages: | 264 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d) |