A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction ed. by Cindy Weinstein (review)

We are approaching a new stage following the “temporal turn” in American literary studies. Scholars of pre-1865 American literature have absorbed and reckoned with the transformative insights emerging from critical studies like Thomas Allen’s A Republic in Time (2008), Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief (2008), Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time (2010), and Cindy Weinstein’s Time, Tense, and American Literature (2015) and are using those insights to shed light on a broader range of texts and genres. In other words, scholarship around temporality is colliding with the canon-expanding work that has transformed our field over the past few decades. One result of that generative collision is the new edited collection A Question of Time, which positions temporality at the center of a trans-periodic history of American literature. Because it deliberately eschews the entrenched periodization that has defined a field like, say, early American literature, the essays in A Question of Time are not organized around the “standard” eras in American literary history (about which more later). In its rejection of so much that we still take for granted, A Question of Time forces readers to ask provocative questions and argues implicitly for a reconsideration of the times that define national and academic life.

Cindy Weinstein’s introduction to the collection situates readers on familiar turf as she engages with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance and its invocation of what Emerson called the “optative mood.” As Weinstein notes, the optative has long defined writing by and about Americans, and it remains a crucial idea to which we (sometimes unconsciously) connect the early United States. Moreover, since Emerson’s words were first spoken in 1842, it is easy to see how the “optative” relates to Manifest Destiny. Weinstein—like several of the authors in the volume—explores the links between space and time as nineteenth-century Americans imagined a future in which space would be conquered, settled, and homogenized. This vision of an imperial American future animates several of the critics in the volume, many of whom look to the past to find alternative imaginings of the United States that might sustain a sense of hope amid the challenges of our collective present, challenges that are unnamed but always present in A Question of Time.

Though the first set of essays deal with nineteenth-century print culture, the essays are also connected in their invocation of a feeling of dread that runs through so many conversations about our national present and future. In the first of those essays, Christopher Looby introduces the “sense of impending” through a bibliographical and textual analysis of Nathaniel Beverly Tucker’s 1836 novel, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future. When it appeared to very little acclaim, Tucker’s novel included a false title page indicating that it was published in 1856, after Virginia had seceded from the United States. The novel was to be republished by both northern and southern presses during the Civil War as a way of either undermining or sustaining the southern cause and would appear again in twentieth-century reprints. The bibliographical history of the novel is quite engaging, and Looby does a fine job of situating the text within its various temporal contexts. Most interesting, though, is Looby’s theorization of the “impending,” which has both a “teleological dimension” and a “countervailing measure of temporal uncertainty” (18). To live with a “sense of impending,” then, is to be convinced that a future outcome is all but assured and, at the same time, to live with human anxieties about a future that is still uncertain. The magic of Tucker’s novel, as Looby explains, is that the author tries to deal with the sense of impending by projecting “a future in which the crisis will have been resolved” (19).

Looby’s invocation of a collective temporal unease finds an echo in Derrick Spires’s examination of the periodical sketches...