Anne Tyler, Clock Dance

Cecilia Donohue (Independent Scholar - North America)
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Prospective readers of Anne Tyler’s twenty-second novel Clock Dance (2018) may be somewhat curious about the significance of the title, although time travel has been a recurring theme in many of the author’s previous works. In this book, the “clock dance” is a step created by three elementary school-aged children, standing single-file with arms stretched out and waving up and down, much as the hands of an analog timepiece would move. If one assumes that some of the times represented in the dance would indicate hours and minutes that have passed, while others would correspond to a future time in the day, it is possible to extend that parallel to the novel’s content relative to Tyler’s existing …

1139 words

Citation: Donohue, Cecilia. "Clock Dance". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 October 2019 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39010, accessed 23 November 2024.]

39010 Clock Dance 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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