This book is about turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literature's discovery that in the overwhelming complexity of everyday life was the key to imagining the future. More especially, it is about the way in which writing in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth sought to express the political possibilities that lay on the surface of the everyday in opposition to conservative forces that relied on historicising American experience by reifying difference so as to suppress a progressive imagination of the future. This new focus liberated American writing from its dependence on the Event as a key structuring principal of aesthetics and turned literary art towards questions of the anti-evental; the ongoing, unresolved, excessive and chronic quality of time. In contrast to the Romantic era's dependence upon the temporally organising principal of the spectacle, Progressive Era literature developed aesthetic practices that sought to find potential in the ongoing and immanent quality of lived experience.