Literary historians have tended to associate the eighteenth century with the rise of the tyranny of the clock-the notion of time as ruled by mechanical chronometry. The transition to standardized scheduling and time-discipline, the often-told story goes, inevitably results in modernity's time-keeper societies and the characterization of modern experience as qualitatively diminished.
In Feeling Time, Amit Yahav challenges this narrative of the triumph of chronometry and the consequent impoverishment of individual experience. She explores the fascination eighteenth-century writers had with the mental and affective processes through which human beings come not only to know that time has passed but also to feel the durations they inhabit. Yahav begins by elucidating discussions by Locke and Hume that examine how humans come to know time, noting how these philosophers often consider not only knowledge but also experience. She then turns to novels by Richardson, Sterne, and Radcliffe, attending to the material dimensions of literary language to show how novelists shape the temporal experience of readers through their formal choices. Along the way, she considers a wide range of eighteenth-century aesthetic and moral treatises, finding that these identify the subjective experience of duration as the crux of pleasure and judgment, described more as patterned durational activity than as static state.
Feeling Time highlights the temporal underpinnings of the eighteenth century's culture of sensibility, arguing that novelists have often drawn on the logic of musical composition to make their writing an especially effective tool for exploring time and for shaping durational experience.

Feeling Time highlights the temporal underpinnings of the eighteenth century's culture of sensibility, arguing that novelists have often drawn on logics of musical composition to make their writing an especially effective tool for exploring time and for shaping durational experience.

About the Author
Amit Yahav teaches English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Reviews
"Feeling Timeprovides its readers with an erudite and capacious look at the feelings that characterize duration and how duration reproduces feelings in ways that capture the ethos of modernity from the eighteenth century and beyond. Its readings are astute and striking. They ask us to reconsider the way felt time figures in a multitude of Enlightenment discourses. If you are interested in philosophical readings of the novel before Jane Austen, then read Feeling Time." * Studies in the Novel, *
"In her elegant study, Amit Yahav argues that chronometry and chronology do not exhaust the novel's ways of engaging with time. Rather, the eighteenth-century British novel explores the phenomenality of duration: the textured, variable, intensive experience of intervals of time. Yahav reveals at the heart of novels ranging from Robinson Crusoe to Sense and Sensibility this experience of duration through the senses and emotions...Yahav's study provides fresh readings of well-known texts; it also opens up less familiar areas that are well worth exploring further." * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *
"Yahav's book offers a compelling new perspective on how temporality can be read as "felt duration" in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *
"In Feeling Time, Yahav turns to the relationship between a sense of time and the experience of reading. Yahav's central contention is that the idea of reading as a suspension of time comes not from the Romanticists, but from the earlier 18th-century novel of sensibility. Yahav reminds us that over 30 years ago Paul Ricoeur conceptualized narrative as mediating temporal experience, often as a way of understanding the representation of consciousness." * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"In this innovative and ambitious book, Amit S. Yahav challenges some overly entrenched critical commonplaces about the Enlightenment roots of modernity while simultaneously elaborating new and compelling analyses of novels and aesthetic treatises that are the well-established mainstays of eighteenth-century literary studies." * Deidre Lynch, Harvard University *



Book Information
ISBN 9780812250176
Author Amit S. Yahav
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press