Time, Tense, and American Literature
When Is Now?

This book examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place.

Cindy Weinstein (Author)

9781107099876, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 October 2015

194 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.42 kg

'A joy to read. Weinstein's writing is full of verve, her readings are revelatory, and her integration of narratology and historicism provides us with an important model for future work. The strangeness and significance of the humblest temporal markers - now, then, before, since - have never been so vividly on display.' Geoffrey Sanborn, Amherst College

In Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future. Taking 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' as her point of departure, Weinstein shows how Poe's way of representing time involves careening tenses, missing chronometers and inoperable watches, thus establishing a vocabulary of time that is at once anticipated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and further articulated in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser and Edward P. Jones. Each chapter examines the often strange narrative fabric of these novels and presents an opportunity to understand how especially complicated historical moments, from the founding of the new nation to the psychic consequences of the Civil War, find contextual expression through a literary uncertainty about time.

1. Edgar's first time
2. When is now? Poe's 'Pym'
3. Heaven's tense: narration in The Gates Ajar
4. Now and then: time in An American Tragedy
5. The 'would' to power: Edward P. Jones's The Known World.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]