"A Narrative of Mere Probabilities": The Unlikely Form of the Early American Novel

Silyn Roberts’ paper considers how emergent theories of temporality in the late eighteenth century century made the early American novel deeply inhospitable to the consolidation of stable racial and national identities of... [ view full abstract ]

Silyn Roberts’ paper considers how emergent theories of temporality in the late eighteenth century century made the early American novel deeply inhospitable to the consolidation of stable racial and national identities of the sort sought after by later nineteenth-century writers. She argues that the formal redundancy of much early American imaginative writing (that is, its great capacity for repetitive, recursive, or disjunctive action) may be profitably read in terms of the shift in eighteenth-century thought from colonial, cyclical conceptions of time to secular, linear time. Taking such works as Amelia; or, The Faithless Briton, Glencarn, St. Herbert, and The History of Constantius and Pulchera as her test cases, Silyn Roberts suggest the narrative experience of recursion (that is, when similar events repeat themselves) and what she calls “temporal foreshortening” (the compression of time experienced as abrupt transitions at the level of plot or setting) is a residual function of premodern eschatological worldviews in which no objective chronology expands into the future or recedes into the past.  In these texts, events and people exist within what Lloyd Pratt helpfully identifies as “diachronic simultaneity.”  These temporal antinomies, she argues, disrupt the elision of difference and conflict on which Dillon’s concept of the “colonial relation” rests, to the degree that the expropriative violence of settler colonialism remains formally present in the novels’ awkward diachronic imaginations.