A Question of Time
American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction

Many of the finest critics working in American literature explore the representation of time from colonial times to the present.

Cindy Weinstein (Edited by)

9781108437103, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 February 2023

363 pages, 16 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.289 kg

'This volume is well worth reading.' Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, Kronoscope(KRON)

This book brings together leading critics in American literature to address the representation of time throughout a wide range of genres, methodologies, and chronological periods. American literature, from its beginnings to the present, provides a particularly rich set of texts to examine in this regard, with its interest in history, modernity and progress. Each essay considers how time embeds itself in a variety of textual representations, including Native American rituals, Shaker dances, novels, poetry, and magazines in order to provide readers with a capacious view of time's constitutive role in American literature. The essays are organized into four sections - Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. Each section reflects a particular approach to the question of time, but taken as a whole the volume makes visible unexpected temporal patterns that cut across time period and genre.

Introduction Cindy Weinstein
Part I. Materializing Time: 1. The sense of impending: Nathaniel Beverley Tucker's, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future Christopher Looby
2. Mary Chestnut's epic time Julia Stern
3. 'I read my mission as 'twere a book': temporality and form in The Anglo-African Magazine Derrick Spires
Part II. Performing Time: 4. 'At the time of that look': the problems with simultaneity in the testimony at Salem Nan Goodman
5. Bad timing: indigenous reception and American literary style Angela Calcaterra
6. André, theatricality, and the time of revolution Jonathan Elmer
7. Shakers, not movers: the physiopolitics of Shaker dance Elizabeth Freeman
Part III. Timing Time: 8. And per se and: time and tempo in 'The Masque of the Red Death' Geoffrey Sanborn
9. The late forever: queer temporality in the poems of Frank Bidart, D. A. Powell and Richard Siken Marta Figlerowicz
10. DeLillo, slowing down Mark Goble
11. Rhyming times: the architecture of progressive time and simultaneity in Richard McGuire's Here Stefanie Sobelle
Part IV. Theorizing Time: 12. The specious present and the Jamesian sentence Jesse Matz
13. Mediterraneans of the Americas: going anti-imperial, comparatively Susan Gillman
14. Faulkner's Light in August and new theories of novelistic time Dorothy J. Hale
15. 'End of the End of the Line': the broken temporality of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest Stefano Ercolino
Afterword Robert S. Levine
Index.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]