Description
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.
