Time, Tense, and American Literature

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).

'Cindy Weinstein, our finest contemporary scholar of sentimentalism, makes the temporal turn in Time, Tense, and American Literature, casting time itself as her protagonist. Weinstein charts the heretofore unexplored nonlinear intervals at the heart of the classic American novel, from its late eighteenth-century origins in the work of Charles Brockden Brown to its twenty-first-century flowering in the African American fiction of Edward P. Jones. At a moment in which the humanities themselves are under siege, Time, Tense, and American Literature insists that we reimagine the power of the literary and its constitutive use of time, space, and form. Weinstein's book should become required reading for scholars of American literature, the new aesthetics, and historians of the novel who will applaud her provocative, brilliant and beautifully written achievement.' Julia Stern, Northwestern University, Illinois

• 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.