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

In this extraordinary work, Donald J. Wilcox seeks to discoveran approach to narrative and history consistent with thediscontinuous, relative time of the twentieth century. He shows howour B.C./A.D. system, intimately connected to Newtonian concepts ofcontinuous, objective, and absolute time, has affected ourconception and experience of the past. He demonstrates absolutetime's centrality to modern historical methodologies and theproblems it has created in the selection and interpretation offacts. Inspired by contemporary fiction and Einsteinian concepts ofrelativity, he concludes his analysis with a comparison of oursystem with earlier, pre-Newtonian time schemes to create a radicalnew critique of historical objectivity.OCR with Table of Contents rebuilt.