Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Archives of American Time : Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Paperback / softback Book

Archives of American Time : Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

American historians have typically argued that a shared experience of time worked to bind the antebellum nation together.

Trains, technology, and expanding market forces catapulted the United States into the future on a straight line of progressive time.

The nation's exceedingly diverse population could cluster around this common temporality as one forward-looking people. In a bold revision of this narrative, Archives of American Time examines American literature's figures and forms to disclose the competing temporalities that in fact defined the antebellum period.

Through discussions that link literature's essential qualities to social theories of modernity, Lloyd Pratt asserts that the competition between these varied temporalities forestalled the consolidation of national and racial identity.

Paying close attention to the relationship between literary genre and theories of nationalism, race, and regionalism, Archives of American Time shows how the fine details of literary genres tell against the notion that they helped to create national, racial, or regional communities.

Its chapters focus on images of invasive forms of print culture, the American historical romance, African American life writing, and Southwestern humor.

Each in turn revises our sense of how these images and genres work in such a way as to reconnect them to a broad literary and social history of modernity.

At precisely the moment when American authors began self-consciously to quest after a future in which national and racial identity would reign triumphant over all, their writing turned out to restructure time in a way that began foreclosing on that particular future.

Information

Save 17%

£25.99

£21.45

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information