William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969)

Abstract

This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams’s Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of forgotten or neglected texts by emphasizing forms of “creative anachronism” in which an author is said to be ahead of their time in ways only recognizable by posterity. Mr. Penrose, written in America in 1776, published in a heavily redacted version in Britain in 1815, and finally published in full in 1969, offers a means of apprehending the far less familiar dynamics of “pathetic anachronism,” wherein a text repeatedly fails to connect with the successive historical moments of its appearance and remains uncanonized. This stalled trajectory of Williams’s novel helps to illuminate the limitations of conventional discourses of textual recovery by tracing them back to tropes of the “found manuscript” and transatlantic shifts in genre popularity in the eighteenth century, as well as Romantic theories of temporal disjunction and the emergence of the historical novel in the nineteenth century and models of textual editing and debates over “the first American novel” in the twentieth century.These three versions of Williams’s novel . . . help us to see how various intellectual, aesthetic, generic, and material factors can mitigate against a text fitting into the mechanisms critics typically deploy to advance the positive qualities of anachronism.