EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics by Michael Boyden
• Abby Goode (bio)

What might the early American tropics have to do with today's climate crisis? What can we learn from late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of climate, the body, and tropicality that might shed new light on contemporary debates about global climate justice and science? Michael Boyden takes up these questions in Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics (2022), a wide-ranging study of climate and sensibility in American literary encounters with the tropics, especially the Caribbean. Highlighting this lesser-known history of early climate thinking and embodied knowledge, Boyden shows how deeply entrenched conceptions of tropicality continue to shape current climate change debates. In this Anthropocenic era, Boyden's work offers a timely and vital [End Page 485] intervention into ongoing conversations about climate injustice and the interrelated impacts of colonialism and environmental degradation. This book will appeal to scholars interested in early and nineteenth-century American literature, transnational American studies, Caribbean history, aesthetics, environmental humanities, and science studies.

As Boyden highlights, climate was not always understood, as it is today, as a singular, global, and abstract concept oriented toward the future. In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as John Locke prioritized direct sensory knowledge as a mode of understanding the climate: we can feel and understand the climate on our skin and within our individual bodies. Boy-den refers to this epistemological framework as "climate sensibility" or "the mutual imbrication of atmospheric circumstances and embodied knowledge" (2). This framework contrasts sharply with that of today's climate science, which prioritizes weather patterns, simulation, and future predictions over bodily sensations: a wind chill on one's face does not negate the broader phenomenon of global warming. Far from arguing against this point, Boyden shows how abstract models of climate knowledge gradually eclipsed climate sensibility as the dominant epistemological framework. As part of this process, climate transformed from a spatial concept into a temporal one. In its earlier version, climate functioned as an index for "ranking civilizations according to spatially defined zones" (6). This spatial conception of climate was rooted in the primacy of sensory knowledge and the mutual imbrication of bodies and discrete climatological zones. Today, however, climate is understood as a process, its impacts defined increas

• The Black Atlantic at ThirtyImplications for the Canon and for Publication and Instruction
• John Saillant (bio)

Two habits of scholars of early African American literature, as we move into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, have probably outlived their usefulness. One is reliance on the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (three editions: 1997, 2004, 2014) for defining the canon in both classrooms and scholarship.¹ The other is the prioritization of authorized versions of Black-authored texts in scholarship and in college and university courses, all of which have relied on publication of those versions in letterpress imprints.² One of the most-cited works in Black studies, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), can help us navigate the transition in which we seem to find ourselves.

Stepping away from the Norton and approaching textuality in a different manner are two sides of one coin. The Norton has prevailed even as scholars and other readers have uncovered previously unknown, unpublished works, recovered little-studied variant texts produced by Black writers, and reattributed published works more accurately to Black writers.³ This process of uncovering, recovering, and reattributing followed the accomplishments of bibliophiles of Black literature such as Arturo Schomburg and Dorothy Porter, yet it has surpassed them in its use of new scholarly tools. These advances were never well represented in the Norton. If we summarize this newer work in a definition of "fluid text" as "any literary work that exists in more than one version"—a notion I draw from John Bryant and Eric D. Lamore—we can focus on its implications for the ideal of the authorized text (Bryant qtd. in Lamore, "Circulation" 65n1). The conviction that fluidity is important implies that each version of a text has its own legitimacy for study. Scholars consider the changes as well as the reasons for change that relate one version to others. A synoptic view of the fluid [End Page 431] texts of the African Atlantic suggests that many of the works once regarded as stable and authentic were part of a series of changeable texts, more like crests and underswells, as in water, than like bound books, as on a shelf. The fluid African Atlantic text will be, if we take it seriously, a remarkable advance in canonicity, scholarship, and instruction.

The canon could be construed as including sets of fluid texts instead of authentic ones presumably authorized by their creators and identified as authoritative by modern scholars. New veins of scholarship could be opened as we analyze the reasons texts change as they move in time and space as well

• Notes on Contributors

arturo arias is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Emeritus Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Merced. Author of Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives, volumes 1 (SUNY P, 2017) and 2 (SUNY P, 2018), Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (U of Minnesota P, 2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (U of Minnesota P, 2000), The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Literature in Light of the New Century (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures: Central American Fiction 1960–1990 (1998), he also cowrote the film El Norte (1984) and has published seven novels. A 2020 Guggenheim Award recipient and 2019 visiting professor at Princeton University, he is twice winner of the Casa de las Americas Award (1979 and 1981) and winner of the Ana Seghers Award for Fiction in Germany (1990).

thomas n. baker is a professor of history at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is the author of Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (Oxford UP, 1999). He enjoys turning cryptic archival discoveries to good use, having published articles on Aaron Burr's intriguing for the presidency, the mysterious letter of "A Slave" to Thomas Jefferson, memory-making in Lyman Beecher's autobiography, and the forgotten genealogy of Deism in New York State.

christopher allan black is an assistant professor of teaching and member of the American Literature faculty at the University of Memphis, where he teaches courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and composition. He is president of the James Fenimore Cooper Society and associate editor of the James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal. His articles and reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in Early American Literature, Rocky Mountain Review: The Journal of the Rocky Mountain MLA, ESQ, the Review of English Studies, and Studies in American Culture. His first book, The Anti-Gallows Movement and Republican Social Justice Reform in Antebellum Literature 1772–1862, is currently forthcoming with Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield. He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Humanities summer research fellowships.

elizabeth a. bohls is a professor of English at the University of Oregon. She has published three books: Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge UP, 1995); Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2013); and Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1772–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2014). Recent inte

Reviewed by:

• The Bravo by James Fenimore Cooper
• Matthew Redmond (bio)

When was the last time James Fenimore Cooper had a moment? The answer might be 1992, when Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans gave us Daniel Day-Lewis as a smoldering young version of Cooper's wonderfully crusty character Natty Bumppo. If that's the case, it has been too long. Today even Cooper's most influential novels—The Spy (1821), The Pioneers (1823), The Red Rover (1827)—are more gestured at than rigorously read, while the lesser lights seldom attract even a passing glance. The Bravo, his 1831 novel about political corruption in eighteenth-century Venice, is among the unnoticed. It is also among the latest of Cooper's works to benefit from the SUNY Press treatment, as that publisher works to deliver "sound scholarly editions of Cooper's major works, based wherever possible on authorial manuscripts" (wjfc.org).

Granting that all of Cooper's works might merit a certain kind of interest just by being his, it seems reasonable to ask what specifically we gain by livening up The Bravo's afterlife with a new edition. Certainly, this novel marks a sea change in Cooper's career, as the first of only three novels that he set in Europe. Cooper had left the United States in 1826, and, like innumerable tourists before and since, he found in Italy's culture and history tinder for the imagination. The result is a novel that centers on Jacopo Frontoni, a young man pressed into serving the Venetian government that has unjustly imprisoned his father. In his search for liberty, Frontoni must navigate a power structure as fluid and murky as the canals' waters. His suffering serves as an indictment of the demagogue-infected republic whose bottoming out, the narrator assures us every so often, will come [End Page 513] not too many decades hence. In fact, the independent Venice of this novel would succumb to Napoleon in 1797 and to Austria in 1815.

For some people, the boon of travel is a clearer perspective on life back home. Getting out of the United States set Cooper's mind only more firmly on his country's problems, even as it widened his perspective on how some of those problems persist across both epochs and oceans. In his send-up of the Venetian government and its failure to represent the best interests of the citizenry, we observe a trenchant critique of Jacksonian democracy. But the novel also represents more deep-seated political concerns. First published in 1831, The Bravo can be situated in a swirl of US cultural productions from the 1830s that were grappling with the subject of the country's long-term prospec

Reviewed by:

• The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age by S. Scott Rohrer
• Daniel Diez Couch (bio)

In many ways, S. Scott Rohrer claims, British loyalism in the colonies during the eighteenth century remains an untold story. Despite canonical studies by scholars including Robert M. Calhoon, Catherine S. Crary, and Mary Beth Norton, as well as more recent studies by Maya Jasanoff and Phillip Gould, Rohrer finds an unexplored, and important, story of loyalism in the figure of Thomas Bradbury Chandler, the Anglican minister at St. John's in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey. Rohrer makes a convincing case throughout The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age. He situates Chandler as a major theological and political node in a network of colonial Anglican ministers, explaining Chandler's education, ideological formation, mission to further Anglicanism in the colonies, and resistance to American independence. For Rohrer, Chandler's life and worldview constitute an "alternative vision" that "has receded from historical memory" (3). Indeed, even as The Folly of Revolution provides a finely detailed biographical study of Chandler's life, it simultaneously tracks the broader intellectual milieu, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century debates surrounding Anglicanism and evangelicalism, as well as republicanism and monarchism. In many ways, for Chandler, the problems of evangelism and republicanism were one and the same. Rohrer's study does an admirable job of examining a range of intellectual traditions through the lens of Chandler's life and learning.

The Folly of Revolution begins by unfolding a central question for Chandler throughout much of his career: "How could social and political order [End Page 481] survive when subjects had the right to challenge authority?" (4). Beginning with his schooling at Yale, where Chandler rejected the Congregationalism of his youth, Rohrer takes us through the minister's meticulously monarchical positions, the most vital of which was his goal of establishing an Anglican bishop in America. He became friends early in his life with Samuel Johnson, one of the chief Anglican ministers in the colonies, a man who fought fiercely for the creation of a colonial episcopate. Chandler took up this cause when Johnson no longer could. In support of his position, Chandler "did not look to the ancient world for guidance," unlike many other American intellectuals, instead opting to exam

Abstract:

Using archival and genealogical sources, this study corrects the long-standing misattribution of the American novels Monima; or, The Beggar Girl (1802) and Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (1807) to Martha Meredith Read. Their true author, Mary Endress Ralston (1772–1850), is introduced as a bilingual Pennsylvania German Lutheran literary pioneer.

Reviewed by:

• A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire by Adrian Chastain Weimer
• Bryce Traister (bio)

From the Errand into the Wilderness to "Schoolhouse Rock," students of American colonial history have offered a variety of answers to the question "Where did the idea of American self-government come from?" Adrian Chastain Weimer's splendid new study, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire, joins this conversation. What Weimer labels a "regional constitutional culture" emerges "in defiance of the Restoration monarchy" (2). Governors, ministers, and commoners, "under extraordinary pressure to compromise with the crown, … developed a cohesive, broad-based constitutional culture … enriched by a wide range of political, artistic, religious and historical forms, [that] would define the region for decades to come" (3). Not content to leave the object of her exhaustively researched study secured hermetically in the past, she remarks, "Its long term implications can still be felt in some places" (3).

A Constitutional Culture focuses on a quite specific period, 1660–67, or, roughly, from the year of the Stuart monarchy's restoration to the year in which the General Court voted to defy Charles II's demand that the New England colonies send agents commissioned to receive direct instruction from the Crown, in London. This would see the end of colonial self-rule and have the colonies acknowledge the Crown's absolute sovereignty (241–42). In lieu of its accession to these demands, the General Court instead sent a tribute payment of trees felled in the old-growth forests of New England that would make masts for naval ships needed in the ongoing conflict with the Dutch and the French (252). When the trees finally arrived, the Crown "received them with surprising warmth," and the colonists provided relief as well for naval forces in the Caribbean. Such gestures were well received, but the larger point was still made: "In restoration Massachusetts, the king's ability to command had run up against a sturdy constitutional culture" (256). [End Page 508]

That culture, at least so far as Weimar's book demonstrates, both solicited and resisted a formal Royal Commission that traveled New England from February 1665 to September 1666 charged with a series of activities that would together assert the Crown's authority in the day-to-day lives of the colonists. The Royal Commission would demand oat

Reviewed by:

• Black Enlightenment by Surya Parekh
• Jordan Alexander Stein (bio)

Black Atlantic writing, indelibly shaped by the transatlantic slave trade, articulates powerful demands for freedom. The project of Surya Parekh's suggestive and learned study, Black Enlightenment, is to ask what else Black Atlantic writing articulates and, indeed, how recent scholars' attention to freedom has made some of those other articulations hard to see. Treating Olaudah Equiano's 1789 Narrative as a temporal threshold—contemporary with the rise of political abolition in Britain—after which concerns for freedom come to dominate Black Atlantic writing, Black Enlightenment turns back the clock to consider earlier eighteenth-century writings by Francis Williams, Phillis Wheatley, and Ignatius Sancho. These span geographies (Jamaica, New England, London) and genres (poetry, letters). Yet they were all taken up, directly and indirectly, by indisputably [End Page 504] major Enlightenment thinkers who also wrote before the political ascent of abolition in the late 1780s, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. Black Enlightenment thus seeks to demonstrate both how earlier Black Atlantic writers made heterogenous claims on Black humanity in the spirit of the Enlightenment, and how those claims were "imperfectly foreclosed" by advocates of Enlightenment who nevertheless could not see to expand its claims to Black subjects (4).

Individual chapters alternate between these points. The first reads Williams's one extant poem in relation to his civil suits that tried to establish his right to property and inheritance from his free Black father. Williams's right to do so troubled Hume so much that in 1753 he revised his essay "Of National Characters" to include a footnote making clear that the deracinated (and what we would now call cultural or historically contingent) claims to national identity for which that essay advocates do not extend to a free Black man in Jamaica trying to claim them as a British subject. This essay and its footnote were read by Kant, who, we learn in chapter 2, elaborates on Hume's footnote in a section of his own Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763). Here we see how Kant pursues racist generalizations that appear simple but in fact proceed through a complex rhetorical "flatten[ing of] the figure of the Black subject" (66). The reader is urged not to dismiss Kant's racism but to understand the carefulness and consequence of the "original contribution" he constructs (52). That contribution morphs, however, by chapter 3, which considers the racism o

Reviewed by:

• Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain by David M. Carballo, and: Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan by Stefan Rinke
• Carlos Macías Prieto (bio)

Five hundred years after Spanish colonizers attacked the Aztec capital, Mexico-Tenochtitlan, scholars continue to debate the cataclysmic [End Page 490] event and its significance. David M. Carballo's Collision of Worlds and Stefan Rinke's Conquistadors and Aztecs grapple with the history of the invasion and conquest of Mesoamerica—complicating our understanding of these events by taking different yet complementary approaches. Collision of Worlds is unique in its use of the archaeological record to highlight the hybrid dimensions of two regions—Mesoamerica and the Iberian Peninsula—over many centuries, whereas Conquistadors and Aztecs (initially published in German as Conquistadoren und Azteken: Cortés und die Eroberung Mexikos) relies on both written and pictorial sources written by European and Indigenous writers to provide a nuanced explanation for "the fall of Tenochtitlan."

Through archaeological evidence, Collision of Worlds explores "the comparative cultural developments of early Mesoamerica and Iberia and the material manifestations of their entanglement in the focal period of encounter, conquest, colonialism, and Native resilience" (11). Carballo's compelling and innovative approach to the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica—using both archaeology and history—reveals that the history and culture of (colonial) New Spain is rooted in the "deep" histories of Mesoamerica and the Iberian Peninsula millennia before the initial encounter. Carballo borrows from archaeology the term deep history—a term that, as he explains, refers to the "layers of occupation" that span "millennia of cultural, technological, political, and religious development" (5). In taking a "deep" historical approach, Carballo traces the ancient histories of both the Iberian Peninsula and Mesoamerica to show how two ancient civilizations "collided" to form what became (colonial) New Spain.

Carballo convincingly argues that a more accurate understanding of the invasion and occupation of the Americas requires mixing lines of evidence and methods to study Iberia and Mesoamerica. For instance, he t

• Challenges, Strategies, and Adaptations in Colonial Mexico
• Veronica Rodriguez (bio)

Catholicism is an intrinsic part of Mexican history and its inhabitants' lives. Residents walking the streets of cities and small communities encounter numerous churches, chapels, or convents. Cultural traditions are strongly connected to religious practices. The three books reviewed here touch on aspects of Catholicism in New Spain. Two of them address the work of Franciscans who worked intensively with Indigenous peoples since their arrival in 1521. Franciscan missionary work vigorously contributed to the foundation and development of Catholicism in New Spain. Edited by Thomas M. Cohen, Jay T. Harrison, and David Rex Galindo, The Franciscans in Colonial Mexico comprises thirteen illuminating essays that provide a broad picture of Franciscans' missionary work in New Spain. The work of John F. Schwaller, The Stations of the Cross in Colonial Mexico, examines the work of Fray Agustin de Vetancurt, offering a thorough analysis of his [End Page 467] work in Nahuatl, Via crucis, while elaborating on the history of the Stations of the Cross. The third book under review here, Transforming Saints, by Charlene Villaseñor Black, discusses the transportation and transformation of female Catholic images from Spain to New Spain. Following diverse approaches, these books underscore how ecclesiastic men and authorities adapt their approaches to the Christianization of Native peoples as they interact with them in New Spain. Interdisciplinarity allows the authors to highlight how Indigenous people, their culture, and their language collide with and influence Spanish Catholicism. These books bring important new light to the study of Catholic practices and products in the Americas, offering more knowledge of Indigenous practices and languages.

The Franciscans in Colonial Mexico addresses the complexity of missionary labor, offering a "broad picture of Catholic evangelization in North America while keeping Franciscans at the center of the story" (5). It comprises thirteen works on Franciscan's participation in