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

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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
Cindy Weinstein is Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge, 1995), Family, Kinship and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2004) and Time, Tense, and American Literature: When is Now? (Cambridge, 2015).

Review :
'The expertly chosen essays in this collection offer a major contribution to the study of time in American literature and culture. Ranging from the colonial period to the present, these pieces reveal the centrality of temporal concerns to the aesthetics and the politics of some of our most important texts and other cultural productions, from canonical literary works to periodical writing, indigenous oral traditions, theatrical performance, testimony, and dance.' Thomas Allen, University of Ottawa 'Bringing fresh insights from neuroscience, queer studies, and performance studies, this stunning collection explores the multiple chronologies of American literature, richer and stranger than anything we have seen. A must-read for anyone interested in the unfinished stories of past, present, and future.' Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, Connecticut 'This volume is well worth reading.' Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, Kronoscope(KRON)