Lynch, DeidreCreighton, Alexander2021-07-1320212021-05-142021-05Creighton, Alexander. 2021. Fiction's Metronomes: Music, Time, and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.28499581https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37368474While the British novel emerges in a century increasingly governed by clocks and schedules, it not only assumes a variety of temporal shapes but also grapples with the antinomies of time as at once countable and defying calculation, present yet impossible to pin down. Following the lead of eighteenth-century novelists, readers, and scholars of music, I call on music’s intimate relationship to time to investigate an underexplored dimension of narrative theory: recursion. Tracing repeated motifs, objects, scenes, and decisions whose repetition seems to short-circuit time itself, I argue that music and novels in this period resisted nascent regimes of time-discipline linked to gender and class. Even as women and the emergent middle class are portrayed in terms of restrictive habits and routines—time as a condition of capitalist cycles of credit and debt—music and novels, by structuring recursion in different ways, together imagine alternative forms of being in and owning (or disowning) time.application/pdfeneighteenth-centurymusicnoveltimeEnglish literatureMusicGender studiesThesis or Dissertation2021-07-130000-0001-7863-778X