"The book is a compelling starting point for Americanist literary critics to consider the affective shifts our field is undergoing at this present moment and from which to wonder whether we are writing ourselves back into alignment with a wider American imaginary, albeit through commitments to a more microscopic frame that reflect our shared desires to no longer look up and take in the full panoramic scale or to universalize about what America 'means.' Still,America is printed there as if it were a jeweler’s mark on every fragment or partial thing that the book takes up as its subjects. Each excellent essay in the collection has a strange aura about it that seems to be asking us to go outside and see if all the world changes again a little bit over that hill. The speculative is, after, a mode of romance, and Americanist literary criticism’s weird love of America, a fact that persists in spite of everything, it seems, dies hard or not at all."

Modern Philology

"[A]n ambitious and insightful essay collection urges nineteenth-century Americanists to think about space and time together...[T]he book’s impressive scope is its greatest strength, as it suggests the range of approaches needed to grapple with such an expansive, complex topic; what emerges from the volume is less a unified 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...[A] heartening testament to the vibrancy of nineteenth-century American literary studies."

Early American Literature