Time in Literature

Time in Literature by Hans Meyerhoff explores how literature illuminates aspects of temporality that scientific analysis often excludes. Sparked by reflections during Hans Reichenbach’s seminars on the concept of time in physics and information theory, Meyerhoff recognized the distance between scientific constructions of time and the ways human beings actually experience it. Literature, he argues, has long been preoccupied with rendering the richness, ambiguity, and depth of lived temporality—qualities irrelevant to physics but central to selfhood, memory, and imagination. The study positions itself as a comparative inquiry: not a systematic treatise on physical time, nor an exercise in literary criticism, but rather a philosophical investigation of how time functions in literature, in human consciousness, and in relation to nature. Meyerhoff openly acknowledges the hybrid nature of his project, straddling science, literature, psychology, and philosophy, but insists such border-crossing is necessary to capture the full complexity of the problem. Meyerhoff situates his work within a sparse field. While earlier studies, such as Jean Pouillon’s Temps et Roman and Georges Poulet’s Études sur le temps humain, examined literary or experiential time, they lacked the systematic philosophical scope he pursues. His book aims instead to develop a general interpretation of literature’s treatment of time as it intersects with the self and the natural world, drawing on examples from Proust, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, and Freud. Meyerhoff distinguishes his project from narrowly aesthetic analyses by emphasizing the broader philosophical implications of temporal representation: how narratives shape human consciousness, how myth and mysticism intersect with conceptions of time, and why modernity has foregrounded temporality as a central problem. He presents his study as exploratory and provisional, yet also as an original attempt to correlate the scientific, experiential, and literary dimensions of time in a unified framework, thereby expanding both philosophical discourse and literary understanding. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1955. Read more