Matthew Handelman
Engaging with a rich and complex array of ideas, Shapes of Time brings together an impressive amount of research to illuminate a significant intellectual-historical momentwhen thinkers turned away from historicism to a modernist notion of history in which the end and the present become intertwined.
Leif Weatherby
Arguing that non-Euclidean geometry shaped how modernist thinkers envisioned the end of time, Michael McGillen—well versed in both modernism and current debates on eschatology and messianism—moves easily between theology, critical theory, and narratology in often brilliant close readings of both familiar and unexpected texts.
Malika Maskarinec
With wonderful erudition and lucidity, Michael McGillen's Shapes of Time leads its readers through the difficult subject of modernism's discovery of a plurality of constructed, curved, and twisted spaces. By showing that these spaces made it possible to reimagine historical trajectories, McGillen's book compels us to take seriously the relationships between mathematics and narrative and the persistence of religious thinking into modernity.