Rethinking the Arcadian Revenge: Metachronous Times in the Fiction of Sam Taylor

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article: In a recent discussion of modernism, Peter Osborne argues that the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modernization” need to be understood through their shared philosophical status as temporal constructions. The emergence of the modern within Western philosophy is predicated on a subjective notion of successive ruptures that distinguish the new from the old. Replacing an older understanding of cyclical temporality, since the fifth century the modern (modernus) (389) thus utilizes a linear, Christian version of eschatological historical time while exerting what Osborne refers to as a “performative logic of temporal negation” (392). In the nineteenth century, this temporal experience of modernity was formulated in Germany as Neuzeit (modernity; literally, “new time”): a new epochal concept unique in its linguistic reference to the contemporaneity of present time (Zeit), as opposed to the preceding periodizations of Miettelalter, mittlere Zeiten or Altertum