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What does it feel like to live in time, and how do temporal feelings influence our thoughts, actions, and communities? This is the focal question of Amit Yahav’s recent book, Feeling Time, and it comes at a welcome moment in eighteenth-century studies, which has seen a major influx of scholarship on objects and space over the last decade. Feeling Time returns to a discussion of time in the early novel that departs from previous accounts of its diurnal mechanics in eighteenth-century culture. Rather, Yahav examines the logics of temporal experience in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, focusing on time’s “qualities,” “intensities,” and “variations” (3). In this account of experiential time, Yahav reveals the aesthetic and ethical implications of “felt duration” in Enlightenment writing (4).
What Yahav calls the “sensibility chronotope” is the main principle of her study. This evokes a broad cultural commitment to the physical, social, and moral feelings that unfold alongside chronometric experience. The term borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope” wherein time is not merely a convention of representation but also an epistemological and ethical category (6). For Yahav, the “sensibility chronotope” is part of a larger project in the novelistic reconfiguration of romance. The “sensibility chronotope” aligns itself with modernity’s desire to cultivate a probabilistic genre. Unlike many Romantic analyses of the lyric form, it allows for temporal pauses (what Yahav calls “off-the-clock-breaks”) to be read as decidedly “durational,” not “atemporal” (10). Feeling Time also looks at temporal “distortions” and “dilations” so as to account for various modes of subjective experience and underscore what “suspended moments feel like” (13).
Although we get what we might expect from Feeling Time—an analysis of plot, narration, and character in texts such as Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and The Mysteries of Udolpho—it is delivered...