A revolution in clock technology in England during the 1660s allowed
people to measure time more accurately, attend to it more minutely, and
possess it more privately than previously imaginable. In Telling Time,
Stuart Sherman argues that innovations in prose emerged simultaneously
with this technological breakthrough, enabling authors to recount the
new kind of time by which England was learning to live and work.
Through brilliant readings of Samuel Pepys's diary, Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele's daily Spectator, the travel writings of Samuel
Johnson and James Boswell, and the novels of Daniel Defoe and Frances
Burney, Sherman traces the development of a new way of counting time in
prose--the diurnal structure of consecutively dated installments--within
the cultural context of the daily institutions which gave it form and
motion. Telling Time is not only a major accomplishment for
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary studies, but it also makes
important contributions to current discourse in cultural studies.