Of Time and Times in Modern Narrative

Abstract

The investigation of some experiments in the treatment of time and history in postmodern fiction starts from some significant examples in the field offered by modern writers and focuses on two major postmodern British novelists, Peter Ackroyd and Salman Rushdie. Some key issues are highlighted, such as the shifting of temporal levels from present to past, and the connections between time and consciousness, with their resulting effects, such as fragmentariness, loss of authenticity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Some similarities between the two writers are significant in drawing a paradigm of the postmodern chronotope.