A Question of Time

American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction

Cindy Weinstein

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108422888
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108534314
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction
• Part I Materializing Time
• Part II Performing Time
• Part III Timing Time
• Part IV Theorizing Time
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index