The Fascination with Unknown Time

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxi

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2. Time in the Making: Why All the Fuss About Time? On Time, the Unknown, and Fascination

   • Sibylle Baumbach, Lena Henningsen, Klaus Oschema

   Pages 1-20

3. Past Futures

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-21

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   2. The Old Made New: Medieval Repurposing of Prophecies

      • Anke Holdenried

      Pages 23-41

   3. ‘Wunschzeit’ Jerusalem: Rethinking the Distinction Between Time and Space in Medieval Utopias

      • Christian Hoffarth

      Pages 43-69

   4. Living on the Edge of Time: Temporal Patterns and Irregularities in Byzantine Historical Apocalypses

      • András Kraft

      Pages 71-91

   5. Unknown or Uncertain? Astrologers, the Church, and the Future in the Late Middle Ages

      • Klaus Oschema

      Pages 93-114

   6. ‘From the Unknown to the Known and Backwards:’ Representing and Presenting Remote Time in Nineteenth-Century Palaeontology

      • Marco Tamborini

      Pages 115-140

4. Unknown Presents

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 141-141

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   2. Introducing Time to Ethnographic Displays: Narrative Strategies of Revealing the Unknown in German Ethnological Museums

      • Katja Wehde

      Pages 143-165

   3. “God’s Time Is the Best:” The Fascination with Unknown Time in Urban Transport in Lagos

      • Daniel E. Agbiboa

      Pages 167-187

   4. Perpetual Wanderers—Timeless Heroes: Gypsies in European Musical Culture

      • Anna G. Piotrowska

      Pages 189-209

   5. The Present: An ‘Unknown Time’ in the German Kaiserreich around 1900

      • Caroline Rothauge

      Pages 211-229

5. Future Pasts

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 231-231

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   2. The Time-Image and the Unknown in Wong Kar-wai’s Film Art

      • Dorothee Xiaolong Hou, Sheldon H. Lu

      Pages 233-249

   3. Suspense in the Cinema: Knowledge and Time

      • Hauke Lehmann

      Pages 251-271

   4. Futurology, Allegory, Time Travel: What Makes Science Fiction Fascinating

      • Kai Wiegandt

      Pages 273-292

6. Back Matter

   Pages 293-300

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This volume explores 'unknown time' as a cultural phenomenon, approaching past futures, unknown presents, and future pasts through a broad range of different disciplines, media, and contexts. As a phenomenon that is both elusive and fundamentally inaccessible, time is a key object of fascination. Throughout the ages, different cultures have been deeply engaged in various attempts to fill or make time by developing strategies to familiarize unknown time and to materialize and control past, present, or future time. Arguing for the perennial interest in time, especially in the unknown and unattainable dimension of the future, the contributions explore premodern ideas about eschatology and secular future, historical configurations of the perception of time and acceleration in fin-de-siècle Germany and contemporary Lagos, the formation of ‘deep time’ and ‘timelessness’ in paleontology and ethnographic museums, and the representation of time—past, present, and future alike—in music, film, and science fiction.

• Unknown Time
• Unknown Space
• Representation of Time
• Nature of Time
• Experience of Time

• Department of English, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

  Sibylle Baumbach

• Department of Chinese Studies, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

  Lena Henningsen

• Department of History, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

  Klaus Oschema

Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature at Innsbruck University, Austria.

Lena Henningsen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany.

Klaus Oschema is Professor of Medieval History at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.

All editors are members or alumni of the German Young Academy (Die Junge Akademie).

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