Overview

The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem, interrogating each other. Taken together, the essays challenge depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing, marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies, queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies, environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies-five political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies. Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only for scholars and students already well grounded in the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but for anyone, scholar or student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most vibrant work in the field. Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie Foote, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo, Caroline Levander, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana Luciano, Timothy Marr, Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo, Mark Storey, Matthew E. Suazo, and Edward Sugden.

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9780812253665

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Reviews

"""The book is a compelling starting point for Americanist literary critics to consider the affective shifts our field is undergoing at this present moment and from which to wonder whether we are writing ourselves back into alignment with a wider American imaginary, albeit through commitments to a more microscopic frame that reflect our shared desires to no longer look up and take in the full panoramic scale or to universalize about what America 'means.' Still,America is printed there as if it were a jeweler’s mark on every fragment or partial thing that the book takes up as its subjects. Each excellent essay in the collection has a strange aura about it that seems to be asking us to go outside and see if all the world changes again a little bit over that hill. The speculative is, after, a mode of romance, and Americanist literary criticism’s weird love of America, a fact that persists in spite of everything, it seems, dies hard or not at all."" * Modern Philology *"

"""The book is a compelling starting point for Americanist literary critics to consider the affective shifts our field is undergoing at this present moment and from which to wonder whether we are writing ourselves back into alignment with a wider American imaginary, albeit through commitments to a more microscopic frame that reflect our shared desires to no longer look up and take in the full panoramic scale or to universalize about what America 'means.' Still,America is printed there as if it were a jeweler’s mark on every fragment or partial thing that the book takes up as its subjects. Each excellent essay in the collection has a strange aura about it that seems to be asking us to go outside and see if all the world changes again a little bit over that hill. The speculative is, after, a mode of romance, and Americanist literary criticism’s weird love of America, a fact that persists in spite of everything, it seems, dies hard or not at all."" * Modern Philology * ""[A]n ambitious and insightful essay collection urges nineteenth-century Americanists to think about space and time together...[T]he book’s impressive scope is its greatest strength, as it suggests the range of approaches needed to grapple with such an expansive, complex topic; what emerges from the volume is less a unified approach to thinking about time-space in nineteenth-century American literature than a sense of the array of fruitful approaches currently being brought to bear on this question...[A] heartening testament to the vibrancy of nineteenth-century American literary studies."" * Early American Literature *"

Author Information

Christopher Castiglia is Distinguished Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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