Time, Tense, and American Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-1-107-09987-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 190 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 440 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weinstein, Cindy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Weinstein, Cindy
Cindy Weinstein is Professor of English and Vice Provost at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and co-editor of American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions. Weinstein also edited The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Cambridge University Press, 2004).