Introduction: Written to the future -- Figures of print, orders of time, and the character of American modernity -- "A magnificent fragment" : dialects of time and the American historical romance -- Local time : southwestern humor and nineteenth-century literary regionalism -- The deprivation of time in African American life writing -- Epilogue: The spatial turn and the scale of freedom
Summary
In a bold revision of traditional historical narratives, Pratt analyzes nineteenth-century American literature to disclose the competing temporalities and racial identities that in fact defined the antebellum period
