Notes
Notes Introduction 1. One dedicated member whose name is lost to history copied each composition into a logbook that is now at the Nantucket Historical Association. The letter from which I quote is reprinted in Lloyd P. Pratt, ‘‘Literate Culture and Community in Antebellum Nantucket,’’ Historic Nantucket 49, no. 3 (2000): 6. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 178. 3. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 9. 4. Ibid., 30. 5. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), x. 6. I use the term ‘‘chronotype’’ rather than Bakhtin’s ‘‘chronotope’’ to indicate how modernity involves ways of being in time that follow from what Giddens calls the ‘‘distanciation of space-time.’’ See my discussion of Giddens in Chapters 1 and 3. For Bakhtin on the chronotope, see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258. 7. In this respect, I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s and Gayatri Spivak’s recent suggestion that literary history must proceed at a level of detail different from what Franco Moretti has called ‘‘reading at a distance.’’ See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). For Dimock ’s and Spivak’s responses, see Wai Chee Dimock, ‘‘Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,’’ Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 85–101; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘World Systems and the Creole,’’ Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 102–12. 8. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 22. 9. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘The Production of Locality,’’ in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 10. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), 62. To suggest that this subject escapes determination by his social context would be to suggest something similar to what post–World War II critics argued about the way the modern American ‘‘sacrificed’’ his ‘‘relation’’ to reality . See Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). This position was convincingly put to rest by works such as Donald Pease’s Visionary Compacts, as well as much of the writing Notes to Pages – associated with the New Americanists, which sought to reconnect ideology critique to the study of American literature. 11. For an account of how Darwin’s theory of natural selection actually favors differentiation over similitude across time, see Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004). 12. For Giddens, the counterfactual work of utopian thought is important to the extent that it allows us to recognize more of the possibilities immanent in any particular moment. Although Giddens emphasizes a utopian realism of the present, I suggest that we might think in similar terms in relation to the past. Thus the critical work being described here is a kind of utopian realism of the past. See Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 177–78. 13. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy; From Politics, a Work in Constructive Social Theory (London: Verso, 2001), 1–40. 14. It is worth noting that Anderson has objected to the wholesale importation of his imagined communities thesis into the U.S. national context. Indeed, he proposes that the particular cultural history of the United States should warn against applying his work to the U.S. national environment. See his introduction to Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 1–28. 15. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 74. 16. Ibid., 129. 17. Rufus W. Griswold, The Prose Writers of America: With a Survey of the Intellectual History, Condition, and Prospects of the Country (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 49–50. 18. George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67. 19. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 9–81. 20. Stephen Owen, ‘‘Genres in Motion,’’ PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1390. 21. Ibid. 22. Amy Kaplan, ‘‘‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,’’ in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New...
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