Reviewed by: A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction ed. by Cindy Weinstein Kelly Ross WEINSTEIN, CINDY, ed. A Question of Time: American Literature from Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 360 pp. $105.00 hardcover; $84.00 e-book. A decade after the publication of such field-defining works as Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Thomas Allen’s A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2008), Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), and Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2010), temporality studies has become a crowded field, leaving one to wonder whether its time is up. The fifteen essays in A Question of Time emphatically prove that there is still much to explore, offering innovative approaches to representations of time in a wide array of literary genres from lyric poetry to serial sketches to the novel. The volume is divided into four sections that highlight the “processual aspects that go into understanding time” (7): Materializing Time, Performing Time, Timing Time, and Theorizing Time. The three essays in Materializing Time examine the relationship between the temporalities depicted in a text and the publication history of that text. Performing Time’s four essays analyze the “theatricalization of time” (8) in specific cultural spaces such as courtrooms and dance halls, while the four essays in Timing Time focus on formal aspects of the texts they consider, from a specific word (“and”) to the narrative equivalent of cinematic slow motion. Finally, Theorizing Time’s four essays foreground a variety of theoretical frameworks, including narratology, cognitive psychology, and postcolonial theory, to make broader claims about literary time. Three of the volume’s key strengths, which I discuss below, are chronological breadth, transnational approaches, and an attention to narratology. Cindy Weinstein notes that the collection offers a corrective to “the heretofore scholarly focus on nineteenth-century America, especially the antebellum period, which has been fertile ground for the temporal turn” (5). The chronological breadth of these essays—covering texts from the late-seventeenth to the twenty-first century—is indeed salutary. Nan Goodman investigates the problems that arose for the justices of the Salem witch trials when accusers claimed in court that “the harm inflicted by the accused and the experience of affliction of the accusers occurred simultaneously” (77). Although accusers were claiming to present empirical evidence of witchcraft, their emphasis on the simultaneity of cause (witchcraft) and effect (affliction) undermined the court’s assignation of blame, since the law required that the cause precede the effect. Stefanie Sobelle’s analysis of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here provides the collection with a chronological bookend to Goodman’s essay. Sobelle also explores simultaneity in Here, which depicts the same circumscribed location (the corner of a living room in the twentieth century) at multiple points in time from [End Page 467] 80,000,000 BCE to 2213 CE. By juxtaposing the familiar sense of time as linear and progressive (what Sobelle calls “human or anthropocentric time”) against “a vaster sense of deep time,” McGuire historicizes progressive time and reveals its destructive potential as it “emerges through colonialism, capitalism, and ultimately neoliberalism” (208). Both Sobelle and Goodman denaturalize “human” time: Goodman by identifying the moment at which causation became crucial to legal proceedings and Sobelle by demonstrating how McGuire uses the graphic novel form to elucidate “cross-temporal intimacy” (212). A Question of Time is all the more valuable for the unexpected connections that emerge from treating such a wide swath of literature in the same volume. There is a productive tension between the volume’s project as Weinstein describes it in her introduction and as Robert S. Levine reflects on it in his afterword. Although Weinstein proposes that “American literature, from its beginnings to the present, might provide a particularly rich set of texts to examine” in regard to temporality (1), Levine commends several of the essays for thinking comparatively rather than focusing exclusively on the US nation-state. Angela Calcaterra’s essay on the...