Maud Casey: Watching the Clock (July 2009)

Fiction is not an expression of real time, Maud Casey notes, and yet it is very much occupied by time; novels and stories are shaped and organized, their revelations dramatized, by the illusion of time passing. Through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, and Paul LaFarge’s Haussmann, Casey considers different ways fiction writers can depict chronological as well as what she calls “emotional time” and the complex relationship between past and present.