An Experiment with Time.

Dunne (J.W.)

An Experiment with Time.

Description: FIRST EDITION, 14 figures to the text, pp. [iv], 408, 8vo, original blue cloth, backstrip lettered in gilt, a few small spots to endpapers, the flyleaf with a pencilled note ('Robert, have you ever encountered this before?'), dustjacket with the backstrip panel darkened and chipped at foot, some splitting to joint-folds, very good

Publication Details: A. & C. Black, 1927

Notes: A scarce book of popular philosophy, which had an enormous impact; its literary influence was particularly great (ideas of time and the individual having a narrative aspect), with J.B. Priestley and H.G. Wells among its most public enthusiasts, but it also found currency with modernists such as Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot, and later Flann O'Brien and Borges. Wyndham Lewis, in 'Time and Western Man', his critique of the 'time-cult' published in the same year as this work, called Dunne the 'most amusing of the time-romancers'.Dunne's work had its origin in dream-premonitions, which are accounted fo...moreA scarce book of popular philosophy, which had an enormous impact; its literary influence was particularly great (ideas of time and the individual having a narrative aspect), with J.B. Priestley and H.G. Wells among its most public enthusiasts, but it also found currency with modernists such as Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot, and later Flann O'Brien and Borges. Wyndham Lewis, in 'Time and Western Man', his critique of the 'time-cult' published in the same year as this work, called Dunne the 'most amusing of the time-romancers'.Dunne's work had its origin in dream-premonitions, which are accounted for by a multi-dimensional theory of time that he dubs 'serialism'. Though concerned with the meaning of dreams, and based on psychic precognition, Dunne opens his treatise with a disavowal of any link to either 'occultism' or 'what is called "psycho-analysis"'. The work, which aimed itself at a lay-reader (advised to eschew 'occasional paragraphs in smaller print' that offered a more technical exposition), proved tremendously successful and ran to multiple editions, including with Faber who published Dunne's subsequent volumes on serialism. Dunne, Anglo-Irish in parenthood but raised in South Africa, had been a soldier in the Boer War before a pioneering career as an aeronautical engineer. His first book, a few years before this (his second), was an innovative work in a rather different field - dry fly-fishing in sunny conditions. HIDE