TY - BOOK ID - 85473839 TI - Time, tense, and American literature : when is now? PY - 2015 SN - 1316371794 131637579X 1316377792 1316378799 1316376796 1316374793 1316163695 1107099870 110749270X PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - American literature KW - Time in literature. KW - Tense (Logic) KW - Logic, Tense KW - Grammar, Comparative and general KW - Logic KW - Time KW - History and criticism. KW - Tense UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85473839 AB - In Time, Tense, and American Literature, Cindy Weinstein examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place. This book argues that key texts in the archive of American literature are inconsistent in their retrospective status, ricocheting between past, present and future. Taking 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym' as her point of departure, Weinstein shows how Poe's way of representing time involves careening tenses, missing chronometers and inoperable watches, thus establishing a vocabulary of time that is at once anticipated in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and further articulated in works by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser and Edward P. Jones. Each chapter examines the often strange narrative fabric of these novels and presents an opportunity to understand how especially complicated historical moments, from the founding of the new nation to the psychic consequences of the Civil War, find contextual expression through a literary uncertainty about time. ER -