Timelines of American Literature ed. by Cody Marrs, Christopher Hager (review)

Lively, polemic, sharply written, and ingeniously researched, Timelines of American Literature makes a collective case for reconceiving temporality in American cultural studies. This scholarly assemblage brings together twenty-one shorter essays, a prologue and afterword, plus a handful of sample syllabi, to address an important question: besides wars, which have long served as period markers, how else can we divvy up the phases of our teaching and research? After a (too) brief introduction, the editors kick off the discussion with an article that readers of this journal may already know (Sandra Gustafson’s “What’s in a Date?”), and a pleasure of this volume comes from hearing the response of established voices alongside more recent, emerging scholars. For the graduate student looking for a field guide, or in my case an older hand in need of a refresher, this volume might double as a state-of-the-field. The collection pulls off a red carpet vibe.

Timelines disavows linear chronology (long a default organization), and the book celebrates scholarly fracturing, which makes the contents difficult to explain. The bulk of the book falls into two parts, “Prehistories and Transitions” and “Ages and the Long Present,” with those divided into two further subsections. Many of the chapters feel like an expanded pet project or the distillation of a first monograph (which in fact they are), explaining the overall prospective quality, occasional jumpiness, and provocative dishevel. The “Prehistories” section of part 1 leads off with a pocket history of braille typography, by Erica Fretwell, raising the question (literally) how we reorganize history from a particular subgroup. Clearing the ground for new discussion, each chapter in this subsection offers a different set of terms: blindness (Fretwell), property (Adrienne Brown), Native sovereignty (Phillip Round), and Mormon cosmology (Jared Hickman). The following section, “Transitions,” circles back to temporality through patroonage in Dutch New York (Jennifer Greiman); the year 1973, “When It Changed” (Gerry Canavan); Confederate memorialization (Coleman Hutchison); and a pair of articles that come straight from this volume’s temporal wheelhouse, from 1857 and the 1820–60 survey (Andrew Kopec, Robert S. Levine).

The fun of reading this book is also its principal frustration. Stripped of an organizational tool that has sat close at hand for too long, making us all a bit lazy, this volume also struggles with the over- words: overview and overlap. Several authors put this confusion on memorable display, including Gustafson (who begins with a teasing multiple-choice quiz) and Dana Luciano, whose bristling open letter to the Anthropocene leads off part 2. As the volume settles into this part’s first section, “Ages,” an argumentative pattern emerges: contributors start from some quirky or overlooked vantage point, then pull a loose string from the canonical tapestry, using the often highly specific example to “destabilize” (190), “upset” (211), “force us to broaden” (213), and so on. The suggested epochs range from plausible to groundbreaking to playful to parodic. We get a series of “Ages”: the Age of Latinidad (Jesse Alemán), required for all English majors; of Van Buren (Justine S. Murison), convincing, if difficult to imagine in application; of Appalachian literature (Wise), a model for regional studies; of Civil War to civil rights, argued narrowly through one essay by Ralph Ellison (Michael LeMaheiu); and “The Age of Warhol” (Bryan Waterman), sign me up. By the second section of part 2, literary history shows its form less as contiguous timeline, more as evocation and loop—through neo–slave narratives (Yogita Goyal); through propaganda (Russ Castronovo); through computer coding and Poe’s reception history (Caroline Levander); microeconomics (Annie McClanahan); politics and formalism (Rachel Greenwald Smith); and through that everlasting form which takes us from the Spanish Mediterranean, to Puritan New England, through Cooper, to Abu Ghraib and Beloved, the captivity narrative (Birgit Brander Rasmussen).

Even as the usual chapter summary seems arbitrary, the chapters do hold thematic coherence. With this review in mind, I found myself drafting my own table of contents on the book...