This is usually an important factor both in the plot development and as an additional indication of the characters’ backgrounds and attitudes.
The time frame of a particular scene is usually established, or at least hinted at, early on, as part of the setting details. These may all be relatively close together, but they may not be – consider Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy, for example: although we may read it in the early 21 st Century, it was written and published in 1817, it deals with plot events around a century earlier (1715), and it is narrated by an old man looking back some 50 years or so at his youth – four different time frames over a three hundred year period. Time in NovelsĪ work of literature can be thought of as involving four different and potentially quite separate time frames: author time (when the work was originally written or published) narrator time (when the narrator in a work of fiction supposedly narrates the story) plot time (when the action depicted actually takes place) and reader or audience time (when a reader reads the work or sees it performed). The lists of books and works mentioned below are necessarily circumscribed and incomplete, and the examples used necessarily a limited and subjective choice.
However, at least a few aspects of it may be outlined here. Time as a theme in literature, though, is a potentially immense subject, and well beyond the scope of this website sub-section. But what we are talking about here is literature where time, and the passage of time, is a major theme, and sometimes almost a character in its own right. chronological development, real-time narration, flashbacks, flashforwards, random temporal progressions, etc), it is still the passage of time that allows plots to unfold, characters to be drawn, etc.
Regardless of the way a story may deal with time (e.g. Just as time is a fundamental element of our existence, it has also been a fundamental element in literature for almost as long as literature has existed.Ĭlearly, all stories take place in time to some extent. Time has been a popular theme in literature for almost as long as literature has existed
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