The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time - Hardcover

Wilcox, Donald J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226897214 ISBN 13: 9780226897219

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1987

Synopsis

In this extraordinary work, Donald J. Wilcox seeks to discover an approach to narrative and history consistent with the discontinuous, relative time of the twentieth century. He shows how our B.C./A.D. system, intimately connected to Newtonian concepts of continuous, objective, and absolute time, has affected our conception and experience of the past. He demonstrates absolute time's centrality to modern historical methodologies and the problems it has created in the selection and interpretation of facts. Inspired by contemporary fiction and Einsteinian concepts of relativity, he concludes his analysis with a comparison of our system with earlier, pre-Newtonian time schemes to create a radical new critique of historical objectivity.

About this title

About the Author:

David J. Wilcox is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0226897214
• ISBN 13: 9780226897219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304