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

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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

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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 28 April 2024.]

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