Skip to Main Content

History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing

Online ISBN:
9780191864285
Print ISBN:
9780198825647
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing

Jeffrey Insko
Jeffrey Insko
Associate Professor, Director of American Studies, Oakland University
Find on
Published online:
20 December 2018
Published in print:
13 December 2018
Online ISBN:
9780191864285
Print ISBN:
9780198825647
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The Ever-Present Now examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts of the past; specifically, the writings of several familiar figures in antebellum U.S. literary history—some, but not all of whom we associate with the period’s Romantic movement. Anchored by the impatient temporality of immediatist abolitionists, the book recovers some of the political force of Romanticism, which becomes clear when we foreground time, especially the time of now. Through close readings of texts by figures as different as Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the book argues that these writers, some explicitly and others implicitly, practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither simply a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant “other,” but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and immutable past with unidirectional movement, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls “romantic presentism” insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience and, hence, of ethics and democratic possibility.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close