| Summary: | The Consciousness of time in modern industrial societies is regulated by the calendar and the clock and is mainly organised in accordance to the structure of our labour vocabulary: Achtstundentag, Fünftagewoche, Lebensarbeitszeit etc. Besides other time systems play weighty roles, according to dates of events important for certain generations, collectives or each individual. Finally we experience the flow of time differently corresponding to the situation at a given time. Dieter Lohr illuminates the historical depths of all these interfering time nettings. By investigating the temporal structures of German narrative prose of various epochs of the last thousand years he reconstructs remote historical forms of the consciousness of time. Under temporal aspects he taps the Icelandic 'Laxd la Saga', Wolfram's von Eschenbach 'Parzival', Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen's 'Simplicissimus Teutsch', Johann Wolfgang Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre', Theodor Fontane's 'Effi Briest' und Heinrich Boell's 'Billard um halb zehn'. The author's relation to time - mostly without his being aware of it at all - is reflected in his representation of the world. In this reflection of his every day perception of time lies the special expressiveness of 'time' in literary texts. The work is neither a history of chronology nor a history of philosophical or physical ideas of time, but a sociological history of the perception of time - literature doesn't describe how time is measured, but how it is perceived. Dieter Lohr shows the wide range of time structures in narrative texts. 'Time' is much more than an indifferent side effect of narrated events. Apart from showing a development of the perception of time from the Middle Ages to the present the text analysis under the aspect of time signals is an interpretation device that allows to draw a large variety of time perceptions and to work out interpretations, which investigate, verify or even correct custo published published
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