Time 'in itself' cannot be had. It can be experienced, felt, represented, narrated, measured, and constructed. Different eras develop thoroughly divergent notions and representations of temporality. But what can the historical transformation of time look like? This is where the significance of aesthetics comes into play. The arts enable time to be experienced differently than the real world: in how it is composed, expanded, realized, postponed, eternalized, and paradoxically juxtaposed. The contributions in this volume, which are to be read comparatively and which analyze the experience of time from poetic, philosophical, and medial perspectives, place the modern experience of temporal detachment in the foreground. Furthermore, they emphasize the will to shape temporality, which stems from the experience of time's phenomenological, transgressive, and ephemeral nature. It is particularly the task of literature and the arts to capture and preserve fleeting moments and to highlight not only their critical value but also their paradoxes. In doing so, these works of art create an aesthetic form that does not eliminate difference but rather transforms it into a mode of intensity.