ABSTRACT
This article considers the role of time in the creation of nationalistic and heteronormative regimes during the First World War. It explores how the temporal structures responsible become queered by the writers Rose Allatini and Bryher in their novels Despised and Rejected (1918) and Two Selves (1923), and how their homosexual characters are doubly alienated from their own time by their refusal to participate in England’s patriotic attitudes as well as rituals of heterosexuality and socially sanctioned development. Drawing on recent interventions by queer theorists in the domain of time and affect studies, this article looks at the convergence between national discourses of belonging and personal feelings of non-belonging, and how they impact on homosexual characters and the alternative temporalities they inhabit.
