Washington Irving's Critique of American Culture: Sketching a Vision of World Citizenship by J. Woodrow Mccree (review)

Abstract

approach to thinking about time-space in nineteenth-century American literature than a sense of the array of fruitful approaches currently being brought to bear on this question. By bypassing recent worn-out methodological polemics in literary studies in favor of positioning the volume within a much wider interdisciplinary inquiry into time-space, the introduction sets up a framework that both highlights and celebrates the volume’s eclecticism, in both its methods and its objects. Book history appears alongside information studies, new media theory alongside editorial theory, theories of environmental agency alongside a variety of historicisms, reflections on archival absences alongside detailed close readings of canonical texts, with no sense of dissonance. The editors declare that this is “American literature 2.0” (11). I worry that this tidy formulation—with its suggestion of both trendiness and future obsolescence—does not do justice to this volume’s significant achievement. While many of the essays make compelling cases for new ways of wrestling with space-time, I finished the book less with a clear sense of the future of such conversations than with a sense of the robustness of today’s scholarship. In both the insights of its individual essays and its overarching methodological pluralism, this volume is a heartening testament to the vibrancy of nineteenth-century American literary studies right now. I hope that the approach to literature on display in Neither the Time nor the Place—its treatment of literature as “an object never given in advance, always under construction, often disputed, and opened up” by an array of methodological approaches (Castiglia and Gillman 11)—is adopted widely and endures for a long time.