Document Type
Contribution to Book
Source Publication
Literary cultures and Nineteenth-century childhoods
Link to Published Version
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-38351-9#
Publication Date
9-2023
Editor
Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN
978-3-031-38350-2
First Page
69
Last Page
84
Department
English
Description
"The popularity of periodical literature in the nineteenth century made textual duration over time a frequent and familiar element of the reading experience.1 On a practical, material level, the text is broken into installments that appear at intervals, and the reader must wait a week or a month for the next issue. During the interval, at the more abstract level of imagination, the text is suspended in the reader’s mind where it blends with events in his or her life. These are both linear and chronological experiences of text over time, but the text is also what Paul Ricoeur calls intratemporal (122). That is, it simultaneously unfolds in a linear fashion and participates in alternate forms of temporality. The material text is an object that proclaims its precise moment in time with the date at the top of the page, yet it is also a piece of a project that endures over time. Moreover, it accrues meaning as the reader’s life intervenes and as the next installment arrives and alters the meaning of the previous one. Of course, the narrative time in serialised work adds another dimension of temporal complexity as years may pass in the chapters of a single installment."
Recommended Citation
Zimmerman, Virginia, "“Being Editors”: Childhood Over Time" (2023). Faculty Contributions to Books. 299.
https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_books/299