ABSTRACT
The literary form of the novel is uniquely positioned to convey the qualitatively different kinds of subjective and ‘clock’ times that organise our lives, as well as the possibilities afforded by narrative organisation to represent lived times. The dominant paradigm of literary postmodernism has waned and the twenty-first century novel finds itself in an interesting position with respect to the question of time. The relationship between queer subjectivity and queer times can similarly be traced in a number of recent novels that examine questions of historical time and linear progress, the anachronism of contemporaneity’s relationship with the past, as well as the possibilities for queer futurity. Networked novels offer a broad range of temporal registers that complicate notions of historical time, narratives of progress, the old modernist distinction between public and private time, as well as reworking postmodernist tropes of simultaneity, chaos, contingency and chance.
