An exploration of Irish author's fascination with time through concepts such as narrative time, daily time, lived time, memory and history, this book examines the intertwined conceptualizations of past and present in the process of narration. Covering the acclaimed works of John Banville, Anne Enright, Mike McCormack, Sara Baume, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Kevin Barry, Lianghui Li reveals how the present time of narrating comes to the fore while the grasp on the past proves elusive, leading to a playful yet intensive interaction between the two. Drawing on growing research on time of narrating and the phenomenological conception of time, Li argues that the contemporary Irish novel highlights the act of narration as a process of temporalization. This process pinpoints the present moment as contingent to provisional reworkings of the past, and as an extendable unit of process sustaining existence.

Through a selective analysis of time in works by Laurence Sterne, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Time in the Contemporary Irish Novel also seeks to trace a lineage of temporal experiments and reconfigurations in Irish literature. Simultaneously, through a close analysis of narrative features, particularly narrative self-reflexivity and tense, Li reveals the nuanced ways that contemporary Irish authors navigate narrative conventions and limitations of language after their modernist and postmodernist precursors, charting the recent development of the novel genre in the 21st century.