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

Archives of American Time examines American literature's figures and forms to disclose the competing temporalities that forestalled the consolidation of national and racial identity in the nineteenth century. Pratt shows how the fine details of literary genres tell against the notion that they helped to create national, racial, or regional communities.  "Pratt seeks to reanimate time as plural, fragmented, and rich with multiple narrative possibilities, which the notion of a singular, national time forecloses. This is an ambitious goal, and Pratt does a persuasive job of reorienting the reader's sightlines; his research is impeccable--all in all a fine book."--American Literature"Lloyd Pratt's Archives of American Time is an ambitious, erudite, and important book that . . . astutely engages with central problems in the history of modernity and nineteenth-century American print culture."--Novel"Archives of American Time examines the pluralization of temporalities in a series of chapters each of which contributes to the study of a distinct literary genre: the historical romance, Southwestern humor, and African-American life writing. . . . Scrupulously examining Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, and Joseph C. Hart's Miriam Coffin, he teases out how the eruption of premodern temporalities, especially the 'persistence of the past in the present,' disturbs those texts' narratives of linear progression and encourages forms of affiliation that cut across those favored by the centripetal forces of nationalism."--American Literary History"A highly readable, accessible study of the way in which certain literary genres incorporated conceptions of time into forms of language. . . . [Archives of American Time] illuminates the way in which the concept of nation serves as a crucial term in the vexed relation between time and modernity."--Nineteenth-Century Literature