Abstract: Paul Harding's Tinkers is a novel about time. The characters' experience of time is greatly magnified within the novel and becomes the main content of the narrative. The novel attempts to represent time as a transcendental existence in order to address the universal theme of humanity. It devotes the most part of its narrative to the change of seasons and the cycle of birth, aging, disease, and death, thus representing a circular, repetitive, ahistorical and metaphysical experience of time in an attempt to propose an ideal of transcendental life. However, as the experiences of time always take place under certain historical circumstances, our specific social existence will inevitably affect or even determine our experience of time. Generally speaking, our experience of time is shaped by economic development and cultural changes; moreover, our individual active, unique, unrepeatable, unchangeable life will turn our experience of time into a unique existence as distinguished from others. The transcendental time that Harding tries to address in Tinkers embodies a return to the theme of humanity in contemporary American literature, whereas the unavoidable historicity of time in this novel displays the intrinsic politics of literature.

Key words: Harding, Tinkers, time