Is there such a thing as a millennial sense of time? The chapter on "Modest Temporalities" by Alexandra Ksenofontova (Research Area 4: Literary Currencies) for The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel answers with a "no, but." Rather than identifying an essential millennial temporality, it proposes to regard millennial novels as a dynamic set of texts with porous borders that share a concern with temporal relations in late capitalism. Ksenofontova examines how the novels Green Girl (2011) by Kate Zambreno and Birthday (2019) by Meredith Russo play with tense, plot, and genre to articulate social criticism while also acknowledging their own powerlessness to transcend the social structures they seek to defy.

  

  

Alexandra Ksenofontova. "Modest Temporalities: Time and Tense in Millennial Novels." In The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel, edited by Loïc Bourdeau and Christopher Lloyd, 33–49. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.