Writing contingent histories: Temporality and the construction of progress in nineteenth-century american literature

Writing Contingent Histories argues that the historiographic dimensions of nineteenth-century American literature should be understood as both testing and contesting cultural assumptions of progress that emerged broadly during that time--assumptions ranging from political ideologies and models of exceptionalism to the projects of reform, abolition, and Reconstruction. It contends that these engagements were shaped through encounters with contemporary developments in the philosophy of history and calls attention to this line of influence with particular emphasis on post-Enlightenment theories of the nation, in which "newness" emerged as a central temporal category supporting narratives of distinctly progressive historical development. In readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles W. Chesnutt, this project finds the distinctly historiographic work of American literature in the nineteenth century to be its iteration of aesthetic experiences of historical knowledge in relation to theoretical frameworks that sustained concepts of national, racial, and moral progress throughout the century. The Introduction demonstrates the confluence of history and progress in post-Enlightenment theories of the nation and argues for the role of contingent modes of knowledge and narration to our understanding of the function of literature in the nineteenth century. Chapter One uses Cooper's early Leatherstocking Tales to explore the function of antiquity in the historical romance, particularly in its bearing on varying frames of temporal experience that had to be navigated and at times suppressed in order to buttress an image of post-Revolutionary progress. In Chapter Two Hawthorne's short fiction is read alongside the theoretical assumptions of Romantic history, particularly the possibility of a communal judgment of the past. The chapter finds that Hawthorne's work illustrates the interplay of history's hermeneutic basis and its communal reception that marks the attempts of both individuals and communities to inhabit political positions. Chapter Three turns to Emerson's engagement with European theories of universal history, particularly in their tendency to negate the historical potential of the individual. The chapter contends that Emerson--in contrast to universal history--demonstrates that individual potentiality arises from a stance of dissatisfaction with the social forms inherited from past generations. Chapter Four reads Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition in light of an emerging school of Reconstruction historiography headed by William A. Dunning and finds that Chesnutt resists a positivistic history of narrative closure and abstraction by invoking a model of polyvocal historical experience.