Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In Telling Time, Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work. Through brilliant readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's daily Spectator, the travel writings of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in prose—the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments—within the cultural context of the daily institutions which gave it form and motion. Telling Time is not only a major accomplishment for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary studies, but it also makes important contributions to current discourse in cultural studies. |
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Telling time: clocks, diaries, and English diurnal form, 1660-1785
User Review - Not Available - Book VerdictBoth of these highly original books deal with modern perceptions of time. Sherman (English, Washington Univ., St. Louis) focuses on changes in clock technology and the innovations in English prose ... Read full review
Telling time: clocks, diaries, and English diurnal form, 1660-1785
User Review - Not Available - Book VerdictBoth of these highly original books deal with modern perceptions of time. Sherman (English, Washington Univ., St. Louis) focuses on changes in clock technology and the innovations in English prose ... Read full review
Contents
Tick Tick Tick Chronometric Innovation and Prose Form | 1 |
In the Fullness of Time Pepys and His Predecessors | 29 |
With My Minute Wach in My Hand The Diary as Timekeeper | 77 |
To Print My Self Out Correspondence and Containment in the Spectator and Its Predecessors | 109 |
Travel Writing and the Dialectic of Diurnal Form | 159 |
Diurnal Dialectic in the Western Islands | 185 |
Other editions - View all
Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 Stuart Sherman No preview available - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
actions Addison appear argues argument become begins bell Boswell Burney century clocks close construction continuity conversation correspondence course critical Crusoe culture daily dates death Defoe diarist diary diurnal form earlier early effect English entry essay example experience familiar fiction figure follow give hand hour John Johnson journal journal letters keep kind later letters lives London manuscript means measure method mind minute mode narrated narrative notes novel observations occasion operates original particular passage Pepys Pepys's period phrase pleasure possible practice precision present Press produced published question readers reckoning record remarks sense sound space Spectator Steele structure Subsequent succession suggests Swift talk Tatler tell temporal textual things thought Tick tion track University watch whole writing written
Popular passages
Page 304 - Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison...
Page 303 - Such histories as these do, in reality, very much resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785, Stuart Sherman |
| Author | Stuart Sherman |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press, 1996 |
| ISBN | 0226752763, 9780226752761 |
| Length | 323 pages |
| Subjects | › › Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |