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.
