Speculative time : American literature in an age of crisis Intro Cover Half Title Frontispiece Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Speculation Prediction and the Great Crash of 1929 2. A Touch of Disaster : (Pre)figuring Crisis in F. Scott Fitzgerald John Dos Passos and Nathan Asch 3. Like a Flood or an Earthquake : Literary and Visual Representation at a Moment of Crisis 4. To Will a Future : Economic Fatalism and Performativity in Archibald MacLeishs Panic 5. Stock Market Luck Has Become One and the Same Thing as Fate : The Anti Determinism of Christina Steads House of All Nations 6. Politics Was Something Like the Numbers Game : Policy Politics and Speculation in Claude McKay Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison 7. Filigreed Webs of Dreams and Politics : Necrospeculation and Counter Speculation in Richard Wrights Native Son Coda: A Long Shadow Endnotes Index. Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid twentieth century. It argues that speculations risk laden and crisis prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period and on important aspects of visual representation.