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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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 |
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Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 Stuart Sherman No preview available - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
Addison almanac appear parenthetically argument bell bellman Bickerstaff Boswell Boswell's Burney Burney's calendar century chronometry citations will appear clocks construction construed continuity conversation Crusoe Crusoe's culture daily dates Defoe Defoe's diarist diary's diurnal form Donne Donne's E. P. Thompson eidolon eighteenth eighteenth-century English entry essay Evelina fiction figure Foucault Frances Burney genre Greenwich Hebrides Hester Thrale Holyhead Huygens's Isaac Bickerstaff Johnson Jonathan Swift journal letters Journey kind literary London longitude manuscript measure mode narrated narrative novel Nussbaum occasion onomatopoeia Oxford paper paradigm particular pendulum pendulum clock Pepys Pepys's Pepys's diary phrase pleasure practice precision present produced prose published Puritan readers reckoning record redaction Robert Hooke Samuel Samuel Johnson Samuel Pepys sense space Spectator Spectator's Steele structure Subsequent citations suggests Swift Tatler tell temporal textual Thrale Tick timekeeping timepiece tion track travel journal University Press words writing