Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, these scholars have not only ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology – ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives, as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates, were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

Chapter 2 is concerned with how the calendrically oriented refrain song repertoire outlined in Chapter 1 plays out in the moment of performance; namely, how singers and listeners might have understood songs and refrains as a form of religious narrative and how the refrain interacts with the experience of narrative time in performance. Chapter 2 considers the temporality of strophic Latin song itself and ways in which the refrain interacts with the linearity and circularity of poetic and musical time both separately and together. Songs that most compellingly bring together the experience of calendrical time with the musical and poetic experience of time in song are narrative works that paraphrase or retell familiar biblical and hagiographic stories, the focus of a series of case studies in Chapter 2. The case studies in this chapter These case studies, which showcase songs about the Nativity, the Resurrection, and saints’ lives (specifically those of St. Katherine and St. Nicholas), emphasize how the refrain operates within the devotional temporalities articulated in each individual work, at times interjecting or interrupting, and at other times integrating musically, poetically, and grammatically into the narrative flow.

This chapter highlights the formative impact of colonial urbanism on the ‘high’ modernist aesthetics of the 1920s, focusing on the role of Dublin in the work of James Joyce. In Dublin, imperial ideals of unity, equalisation and harmony were inscribed onto the architectural landscape and crystallised in early twentieth-century British philanthropic discourses. This chapter focuses on the Empire Day movement, whose organisers aimed to inspire pride and participation in colonial subjects through a day-long urban celebration. While this event attempted to synchronise time across the empire’s cities, as part of an early Commonwealth imaginary, Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode from Ulysses confronts readers with experiences of dissonance and asynchronism, just as the temporality of the episode itself resists readerly synchronisation.