This book contains a selection of the papers presented at a conference hosted by the MDRN research lab of the University of Leuven (www.mdrn.be) in 2013. It explores the breadth and depth of the issues of time and temporality in European modernist writing and classic avant-garde literature.
High-modernist and avant-garde authors were not the first to investigate in detail the problems of time and temporality, but their reflection has proven essential to our contemporary views on the subject. To date, however, we still lack a systematic understanding of the different forms and functions of time and temporality in the writings of the period. This book wants to fill this gap, not by delivering clear-cut answers to complex questions, but by presenting the multi-layered and often contradictory perspective on time articulated in the modernist era.