“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1946–47, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”1

This chapter builds a new interpretative, cross-disciplinary model for identifying and understanding non-contemporaneity in British fictions of the not yet. Whilst many critics have commented in recent years upon the resurgence of temporality in critical and literary discourse, few studies have explored the literary representation of time across a range of disciplinary approaches. This chapter considers twenty-first-century analyses of temporality in literature as they are developing within the ‘new‘ modernist studies, post-spatial approaches to literary postmodernism, ‘post-classical‘ studies of temporal organisation within narratology, and cosmopolitan and post-secular readings of fiction. The chapter also considers key developments in utopian studies over the second half of the twentieth century, which paved the way for a study of utopian anticipation in the contemporary period. The chapter concludes by arguing for a more nuanced model of non-contemporaneous times that can help us parse the utopian dimensions of lived time as it is represented in innovative contemporary narrative forms.