Keywords
Sylverster Judd
Margaret
Transcendentalism
deep time
American utopia
Early Modern English utopia
How to Cite
Abstract
Inspired by Wai Chee Dimock’s (2009 [2006]) innovative reconceptualization of American literature, this article explores her notion of “deep time” with regard to literary genre, understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance rather than as a category in the classical Aristotelian view. When applied to American literary texts, this approach makes it possible to notice affinities between these texts and the works which time- and space-wise exceed the conventionally recognized boundaries of American literature. As an instance of such a reading, I propose to re-examine Sylvester Judd’s (1813–1853) utopian romance Margaret (1845), apparently the most successful novel of Transcendentalism, in the context of Early Modern English utopia. Although at first glance American utopias are distinct from English representatives of the genre, under a careful consideration it is possible to discover several parallels between them that allow the two traditions to be understood as “cousins” sensu Dimock. Drawing on Artur Blaim’s (2013) study of Early Modern English utopia, the article discusses selected features of the genre and demonstrates how reading Margaret exclusively as a New England novel may lead to misunderstandings and misconceptions. Finally, the notion of “deep time” is explored as an intra-textual thematic thread via which the utopian community simultaneously exists in particular spatio-temporal conditions and within what can be called, after Dimock, a “denationalized space”.
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