Time travel is of interest in several academic research fields that overlap and communicate with one another to varying degrees. Primarily, of course, time travel comprises a literary subgenre of science fiction literature and popular film. As a motif or plot type, it is also a frequent element in romance fiction, nongeneric speculative literature, postmodern literature, and experimental cinema. As such, time travel is potentially a focus for practitioners in many branches of criticism and theory, including genre studies, cultural studies, critical theory, film theory, psychoanalytic criticism, and, especially, narrative theory and narratology. Nevertheless, literary and cultural theory on the topic of time travel has been surprisingly sparse, and only a handful of dedicated studies are available at either book or article length. By contrast, in research areas outside literature and popular culture, time travel has received something closer to its due. In analytic philosophy, time travel is a familiar topic of inquiry or debate, usually serving as a thought experiment for logicians and philosophers of language or history, and as a test case for constructing meaningful or consistent claims about objects and events (See the Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article “Time Travel”). For physicists, time travel has played a similar role as a test for postulates of relativity and quantum mechanics, but it has also sporadically arisen as a real physical possibility within current theory, albeit a possibility that might require as-yet undiscovered theories or exotic materials. In particular, recent multiverse cosmologies and quantum computing models sometimes include time travel or multiple worlds as essential components or entailments. Finally, in historiographical theory, counterfactuals and possible-worlds models have been productive tools for theorizing historical events, creating a potentially rich area of overlap with literary and narrative theory.
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