Time, TEnse, and American Literature: When is now?Cindy Weinstein
Cambridge University Press, 2015
Time, Tense, and American Literature: When Is Now? by Cindy Weinstein examines how time and narrative tenses—past, present, and future—are used in American literature to explore historical and psychological moments. The book looks at how authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Theodore Dreiser, and Edward P. Jones use shifting tenses to reflect the complexities of their respective time periods, from the nation's early days to the post-Civil War era. Weinstein’s analysis focuses on how these literary techniques convey deeper cultural and historical meanings, offering a fresh perspective on how time influences storytelling in American literature.
"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."