Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

Martin Kich (Wright State University)

Ed. by Sofia Ahlberg, Uppsala University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2003

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Powers’ eighth novel is a family saga in which race and music are interconnected and interlayered with elements of personal, family, racial, and national identity. On the one hand, the novel is a conceptual appropriation of the principles of physics—time and place, energy and mass, proximity and distance, momentum and inertia, refraction and reflection. On the other hand, it explores the fundamental concepts of artistic creation—composition, performance, adaptation, appropriation, assessment, and preservation. In a review for the

Sunday Tribune

in Ireland, Joseph O’Connor offers this succinct assertion about this novel: “This is a clamorously beautiful magnum-opus to possibility, as much as it is a love-song to lost hopes and disunited states.”

The novel focuses on the

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

4065 words

Citation: Kich, Martin. "The Time of Our Singing". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 March 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21619, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback