Time, Tense, and American Literature - When Is Now?

This book examines canonical American authors who employ a range of tenses to tell a story that has already taken place.

List of contents

1. Edgar's first time; 2. When is now? Poe's 'Pym'; 3. Heaven's tense: narration in The Gates Ajar; 4. Now and then: time in An American Tragedy; 5. The 'would' to power: Edward P. Jones's The Known World.

About the author

Cindy Weinstein is Professor of English and Vice Provost at the California Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and co-editor of American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions. Weinstein also edited The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Cambridge, 2004).

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Cindy Weinstein, Cindy (California Institute of Technolo Weinstein, Cindy (California Institute of Technology) Weinstein
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 09.10.2015
• EAN: 9781107099876
• ISBN: 978-1-107-09987-6
• No. of pages: 194
• Series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture; Cambridge Studies in American
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies