Joseph Albernaz

“Time Torn Holiday” demonstrates how literature proposes and enacts its own unique temporalities. It does so by attuning to language’s specific capacities to preserve and refashion lost experiences of time during the historical ruptures of revolution, industrialization, declining popular festivals, and slavery’s unfree time. Spanning Britain, France, and the Caribbean around 1800, it reads poetry, drama, slave narratives, political documents, and revolutionary calendars to understand time as struggle between top-down regulation and bottom-up rebellion. An attention to literature as a confrontation with the politics and aesthetics of time reveals the enduring importance of this period, at the dawn of global industrial modernity, to contemporary conceptions of time, history, work, race, and freedom.
When William Wordsworth suggested that a poem could become a “living calendar” in 1798, he was writing against both the French Revolution’s attempt to reset the calendar to Year 1 and the ideology of linear, abstract progress in rapidly industrializing England. As a “living calendar,” literature offers a mode of historical experience and political agency that cannot be fully depicted in historiographical studies or captured succinctly in concepts. Rather, it takes us into the heart of language as a collective temporal event.