My title both chastises me for the tardiness and congratulates me for the timeliness of my book. In 1989, David Wood predicted that ‘our centurylong “linguistic turn” will be followed by a spiralling return to time as the focus and horizon of all our thought and experience’ (David Wood 2001: xxxv), and it is about time that this prediction about time came true. The need as I see it is partly as Wood described it: the need for a ‘programme for the analysis of temporal structures and representations of time’ (xxxvi). Alongside such a programme, there is also a need for a theoretical account of time which might rescue the analysis of temporal structures from some of the vagueness of new historicism, cultural history, Derridean hauntology, the uncanny and the cultural theory of postmodernism. It is particularly in relation to fiction, to the strange temporal structures that have developed in the novel in recent decades, that a clear framework for the analysis of time seems necessary. But there is also a need to revisit the relation of fiction and philosophy because of these strange temporal structures, to ask what domain of understanding or knowledge might be occupied by the contemporary novel on the subject of time, or what effects these structures might exert in the world.

The word about has turned out to have a resonance for my topic that I didn't fully anticipate. If primarily it means ‘on the subject of’, it carries within it a set of general problems about the content of language and, for my purposes, a specific question about fiction: what does it mean to say that a fictional narrative is ‘on the subject of’ time? Many who have written on this topic have chosen to focus on novels which are manifestly, perhaps intentionally, about time.