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

The book examines how nineteenth-century writers thought about history. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves rather than those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book locates that impatient attitude in the period's philosophy, in the work of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and its fiction, by writers like Herman Melville. This impatience and insistenceon now, the present, as...
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The book examines how nineteenth-century writers thought about history. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves rather than those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book locates that impatient attitude in the period's philosophy, in the work of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and its fiction, by writers like Herman Melville. This impatience and insistenceon now, the present, as the time of action, represents a particular way of thinking about history: one that does not see the past and the present as separate and distinct or view time as moving forwardin a straight line. Rather, the present contains the past and the future at once.