The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

Global history stands out by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. As they put forms and structures of ‘global integration’ centre stage, global historians have not only made statements about the direction of history the foundation of how they define their area of study; they also ascribe at least partial explanatory power to them. The chapter argues that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on how global historians construe historical change over time. It delves into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and presents responses global histories may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. It also discusses the dialectics involved in processes of global integration and offers the outlines of a global history more attuned to the (unrealised) expectations and ‘futures pasts” among historical actors and to historical uncertainties produced under the impact of global interconnection. While the directionality/teleology problem poses particular challenges for global historians, it also can help think about multiple ‘guiding scripts’ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

Attending to the multitude of temporal markers found in Clare’s poetry, this essay argues that his representation of time and his thematic and stylistic experimentation with temporality demonstrate his pivotal place in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century labouring-class poetry. Finding, having, and protecting time to write – asserting writing as an activity (whether conceived of as ‘work’ or as a pastime) for which one could have or take the time – was fundamental for Clare, his predecessors, and successors, to publish at all. Examining the burgeoning awareness of what E. P. Thompson has named ‘work-time discipline’, the essay traces how awareness and time anxiety impacts artistic self-fashioning for poets such as Robert Dodsley, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Bloomfield among others. However, Clare’s work remains an important point of transition for understanding how plebeian poets shaped their artistic identities within increasingly constraining notions of work.

The search for the causes of disease is an obvious central step in the pursuit of better health through disease prevention. In the previous chapters we looked at how we measure health (or disease) and how we look for associations between exposure and disease. Being able to identify a relation between a potential cause of disease and the disease itself is not enough, though. If our goal is to change practice or policy in order to improve health, then we need to go one step further and decide whether the relation is causal because, if it is not, intervening will have no effect. As in previous chapters, we discuss causation mainly in the context of an exposure causing disease but, as you will see when we come to assessing causation in practice, the concepts apply equally to a consideration of whether a potential preventive measure really does improve health.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

This chapter examines the origins and style of the early English essay, in order to consider the peculiarities of the form. The first section discusses the vexed origins of the English essay, which arrived on the literary scene both as an innovation, and as a continuation of older forms of moral discourse. It argues that essays were characterised by a paradoxical relationship to temporality, affecting both how the form began, and its style, in representing thought and thinking. Examining the style of essays by Francis Bacon, William Cornwallis, Nicholas Breton, Owen Felltham, and John Hall, the chapter uncovers a tension between flow and stasis, evident in punctuation and the structure of sentences. Rather than taking this to signal two distinct styles of the early English essay, associated respectively with Montaigne and Bacon, the chapter argues that it is the tension that is characteristic, oscillating between the representation of deliberation and decision.

This envoi looks at the impossible necessity of literary history. It explores the term ‘literary’, marking how it both opens ancient writing to scrutiny and obscures significant sets of connections or ideas, and it questions how narratives of the history of literature are always unfinished, partial and ideologically laden. It discusses the place of literary history within the field of classics.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the most prominent figures in the 1830s literary scene. She became known, and was often condemned, for a ‘fatal facility’: a tendency to write too easily and too frequently for a market that was itself so overproductive that its grasp on posterity’s regard has proved unstable. Landon’s work in the 1830s mirrors the decade in its variety, its speed of production, its dubiety about cultural status, and its self-conscious reflection on its own potential place in literary history. This chapter explores a wide range of Landon’s 1830s work, work that has typically been passed over by her critics. It explores her interactions with the market via such forms as Silver Fork fiction, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and ‘hack’ journalism. Her work is shaped by her unstable place as both a literary celebrity and a worker for the press, a combination of identities that was especially difficult for a woman writer. She became the decade’s chronicler: her experiments in 1830s literary forms produce a mode of understanding the uncertain temporality of this unusually self-conscious decade.

This chapter argues that the New York School of Poets occupy a complex transitional moment in relation to both the history of sexuality and the history of poetry and modern art. Their work is governed by both the epistemology of the closet that shapes high modernism from earlier in the twentieth century and, looking forward to Stonewall and Gay Liberation, also presents utopian potentialities in its experimental forms of sociability.

The Introduction to this book offers an overview of the literary culture of the 1830s. It explores existing literary-critical approaches to the decade’s culture, and considers why the decade has proved so resistant to absorption in literary genealogies. This is a consequence of the decade’s own uncertainty about and self-conscious analysis of its literary temporality. The Introduction proposes that the 1830s are uniquely placed to direct the future interests of contemporary literary studies.

The Introduction proposes that a microhistorical lens on the departure of over 40,000 Italians from Egypt after the Second World War helps us to understand how historical temporalities and political membership shape migrant departures. It takes as its starting point the question of the memory of Italian departures from Egypt among Egyptian migrants in contemporary Italy. It frames the book’s argument in relation to ideas about historical time and conflicting notions of the Italian population in Egypt as ’out of time’, demonstrating that a history of temporalities which focuses on the future, present, and past can shed new light on processes of migration in the Mediterranean. It then articulates how political membership, as an encompassing concept functioning within these temporal frameworks, illustrates the construction of the categories normally ascribed to migrants and migrant communities in and beyond the Mediterranean. Finally, it draws these theoretical and methodological threads together to rethink periodisations of European and Mediterranean empires and decolonisation.

This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

This chapter addresses the connections between queer theory and the history of sexuality. The chapter introduces the origins and development of queer theory as an approach that perceives sexuality and gender as constructed and rejects the notion of fixed and stable identities. The chapter addresses queer theory’s adaptation to different geographical locations and questions related to the translation of the term “queer” from one language to another. It continues with discussing the connections and tensions between queer theory and the history of sexuality, and addresses queer perspectives on the archive and the practice of oral history as topics on which the queer theoretical developments have particular relevance for historians. The chapter focuses on two aspects in queer theory, namely the continuities and ruptures in history as well as queer approaches to temporality. The chapter closes with a short reflection on the future possibilities of utilizing queer theory for studies on the history of sexuality. The chapter argues that while queer theory and contemporary research on the history of sexuality already converge in essential points, such as understanding sexuality as socially constructed and the distrust of ahistorical identities, the relationship between these two still holds unexplored opportunities for research.

In the conclusion, I reflect on Yeats’s “A General Introduction for my Work” of 1937. It is an unusual text, meant originally to introduce his collected works but left unpublished until the posthumous Essay and Introductions (1961). It leads a negative dialectical existence, severed from its original place and left to perform a fugitive function with respect to the poet’s own oeuvre. For this reason, perhaps, it serves less as an introduction than as an epilogue, a summation of certain key ideas about revivalism, his poetry, and his occult works. Yeats sees from the vantage point of his later years that his literary style – as well as the worlds it creates in his work – could only have emerged from the bedrock of the self. Two years after Yeats composed his “General Introduction,” W. H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” wrote that after his death, the poet “is scattered among a hundred cities,” part of a vital future he had to leave behind: “The words of a dead man /Are modified in the guts of the living.” It is just this sort of continuance and renewal that characterize Yeats’s revivalism and his hope for coming times.