This essay explores ideas of the untimely in connection with a queer politics in Faulkner: queer a commitment to imagining novel forms of dissident desire, pleasure, and affiliation; untimeliness an effect of the non-coincidence of chronological and political temporalities.Faulkner’s fiction is staggered temporally not only as a result of his well-known determination to recollect the traumatic past of nation, region, and individual, but also by less noticed efforts to grasp, in that past, alternative futures, some now foreclosed, others still biding their time. In Faulkner’s historical fiction like Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, we find materializations in the past of futures that may not come to pass; in novels set in the present such as Light in August, we encounter dissident ways of life that resist modern normative constraints; in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem another dimension of the untimely appears, in forms of futurity that beckon with unprecedented gratifications of desire while threatening the resurgence of past forms of bondage.

This chapter is a close reading of Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus and Ralph Fiennes’s 2010 Coriolanus.Both films challenge the stock image of historical Rome in Taymor’s case by extensive allusion to other iconic films, costumes and settings; in Fiennes’s case by updating the film’s action to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.In these differing ways, both films insist on the omnipresence of violence. The chapter concludes that this apparent rejection of a stereotypical or immediately recognisable Roman setting is actually closer to the ambiguous sense of the classical seat of empire that Shakespeare’s first audiences may have harboured.Rome is less a physical place and more of an idea but it is an idea riddled with contradictions.Neither film attempts to erase these contradictions; indeed, their stress on anachrony causes both to recapitulate the uncertainties, regarding Rome, of the plays’ early audiences.

Confronts the synchronic model of time which underpins Quintus’ whole interval poetics and approach to Homer. Analyses the key narrative features of time in the poem: pacing, counterfactuals, anachronies and motifs of closure. Proposes that Quintus draws on the two different narrative forms offered by the Iliad and Odyssey and radically recombines them into one. Given the political dimensions attached to these forms, the chapter ultimately suggests the ideological implications of this technique. By merging teleological and open narratives, Quintus creates a positive reading of the ‘inevitability’ and ‘continuity’ associated with the advance of empire, celebrating for imperial Greece the open-ended potential of the closed Homeric text.