Archives of American Time

Lloyd Pratt is Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford. He is author of The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Introduction: Written to the FutureChapter 1. Figures of Print, Orders of Time, and the Character of American ModernityChapter 2. "A Magnificent Fragment": Dialects of Time and the American Historical RomanceChapter 3. Local Time: Southwestern Humor and Nineteenth-Century Literary RegionalismChapter 4. The Deprivation of Time in African American Life WritingEpilogue: The Spatial Turn and the Scale of FreedomNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments

"Pratt seeks to reanimate time as plural, fragmented, and rich with multiple narrative possibilities, which the notion of a singular, national time forecloses. This is an ambitious goal, and Pratt does a persuasive job of reorienting the reader's sightlines; his research is impeccable-all in all a fine book." (American Literature) "Lloyd Pratt's Archives of American Time is an ambitious, erudite, and important book that . . . astutely engages with central problems in the history of modernity and nineteenth-century American print culture." (Novel) "A highly readable, accessible study of the way in which certain literary genres incorporated conceptions of time into forms of language. . . . [Archives of American Time] illuminates the way in which the concept of nation serves as a crucial term in the vexed relation between time and modernity." (Nineteenth-Century Literature) "Archives of American Time examines the pluralization of temporalities in a series of chapters each of which contributes to the study of a distinct literary genre: the historical romance, Southwestern humor, and African-American life writing. . . . Scrupulously examining Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, and Joseph C. Hart's Miriam Coffin, he teases out how the eruption of premodern temporalities, especially the 'persistence of the past in the present,' disturbs those texts' narratives of linear progression and encourages forms of affiliation that cut across those favored by the centripetal forces of nationalism." (American Literary History) "Essential." (Choice) "Archives of American Time does something only a few special books have been able to do quite so well in recent years: it makes nineteenth-century American literature relevant to some of the most important arguments being made right now by scholars in other areas-arguments about temporality and spatial scale, print, postcoloniality, and global literary culture." (Trish Loughran, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)