This project focuses on how the cultural imagination of the loop is increasingly shaping fictional narratives in literature, film, TV series, and video games, through works that center on or feature a time loop. Preliminary research (Schniedermann 2023; 2025) has shown that time loop narratives raise unique narratological challenges and speak to significant tensions within US culture, particularly on the level of race and gender. The project will substantially develop the narratology of time loops and explore the cultural work performed by this narrative form in relation to both social and environmental threats, in the US and in other Anglophone countries.