EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE最新文献

Abstract:

John Marrant was a Methodist missionary in Nova Scotia from 1785 to 1789, serving Black Loyalist refugees settled there by the British Empire after its North American defeat. His journal, published in 1790, records numerous occasions when he preached, as well as helping settlers petition the colonial government for supplies. Scholars have explored Marrant's theology as revealed in the Journal. I shift the focus toward communalism, examining the ways it incorporates traces of communities of displaced people in two genres: the extempore sermon and the petition. Each bridges the oral and the written and is grounded in a community or collectivity. Marrant noted his hearers' responses to his sermons in a shorthand, which I examine; I also draw from a published sermon he preached in Boston on his way back to England. Lacking the Nova Scotia petitions, I turn to surviving petitions by Black Loyalists who traveled to Sierra Leone, as well as Marrant's descriptions of his interactions with the petitioning Nova Scotia settlers.

• Early American Literature Book Prize for 2023

Awarded jointly to: Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Kelly Wisecup

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Kelly Wisecup, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor of English, Northwestern University, have been selected to receive the 2023 Early American Literature Book Prize. Gruesz's Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas was published by Harvard University Press in 2022. Wisecup's Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures was published by Yale University Press in 2021. The prize selection committee consisted of Early American Literature's Coeditors, Cassander Smith and Katy Chiles; the incoming Chair of the Modern Language Association's Early American Forum, Jeffrey Glover; and the prior President of the Society of Early Americanists, Patrick Erben. We thank our publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, for continuing to support the award, which carries a $2,000 cash prize.

Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons, as the selection committee determined, is an unparalleled study of a major American writer at the nexus of languages, cultures, and migrations. It is a culmination of decades of the author's work in the field of multilinguistic early American literature, and it offers a transformative portrayal of a region, tradition, and history at the center of the field. The book is at once intimate—taking us inside the Mather household and reconstructing the sounds and imprint of the languages spoken and studied there—and expansive, widening in scope to describe the very constitution of American racial identities through the medium of language. It's a deeply insightful portrait of a writer and his work and the world he helped to make. [End Page 263]

This book provides a truly new look at a familiar figure in early American literary studies. It is the kind of monograph that doesn't just tell scholars a great deal about Cotton Mather; it is the kind of monograph that can reformulate the field of early American literary studies. Written with a great deal of verve, it connects early American literature with today's very pressing issues of migration and immigration. This book is an enormous accomplishment, a landmark study of profound reach and relevance, and a powerful justification of the importance of early American literary studies to the broader world.

Assembled for Use presents a method that enables scholars to approach colonial archives from Native perspectives to understand the significance of lists, recipes, scrapbooks and other non-narrative texts as literacy pr

• Editors' Note
• Katy Chiles and Cassander Smith

We love being the bearers of good news! In this issue, we are thrilled to report that the Early American Literature Book Prize for 2023 has been awarded jointly to Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Harvard University Press, 2022) and Kelly Wisecup, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor of English at Northwestern University, for Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilations and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale University Press, 2021). See page 263 for a more detailed statement about the awardees. Congratulations, Professor Gruesz and Professor Wisecup!

We are also excited to announce that Autumn Hall, EAL's Digital Media Editor and an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, has been selected for the National Humanities Leadership Council (NHLC) of the National Humanities Center. Chosen from universities across the United States, the NHLC undergraduate students "participate in a unique series of interactive experiences with leading humanities scholars and leaders," "explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society," and "focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions" (https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/national-humanities-leadershipcouncil/). Autumn does great work for us here at EAL, and we are excited to see her collaborating with her peers to demonstrate the value of the humanities to our lives. The future of the humanities is in good hands.

Finally, we are proud to present our second issue as editors. This issue's three essays all examine figures very much familiar to early American studies—John Winthrop, John Marrant, and J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. The essays attend to the subjects with great nuance that deepens our knowledge about the rhetorical, archival, and linguistic nature of early American cultures. Adam N. McKeown's essay, "Reconciliation in John Winthrop's [End Page 259] History of New England," offers a new take on Winthrop's History and colonial Massachusetts by examining the concept of reconciliation as a sociopolitical strategy and a rhetorical tool employed to cast the colony as tolerant. The essay centers on the textual representation of what McKeown calls "reconciliation events," those moments of conflict and resolution between colonial government and dissenters, figures such as Anne Hutchinson, John Wheelwright, and Roger Williams. He argues that Winthrop's History portrays such events as instances of a co

• Revisiting Mayas, Revolutionizing Discovery
• Arturo Arias (bio)

Simply leafing through the books reviewed here, I was immensely pleased to see the evidence that Maya scholarship has undergone radical transformations in the past few decades, thanks in large part to the discoveries made possible through LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, the decipherment of Maya glyphic writing, and the remarkable growth of ancient DNA research, such as the study evidencing how Chibcha migrants brought improved maize from the Andean region to Mesoamerica (Kenneth et al.). With these technologies, researchers have been able to locate structures and roads normally hidden away by the dense tropical rainforest canopy; to decipher Maya glyphs in their entirety, thus reconstructing their written history, mathematics, and astronomy, [End Page 443] which date back a few millennia; and to establish their genetic heritage, thus understanding better early migratory patterns throughout the Americas and interconnections between vast regions: Mesoamerica, the Andean highlands, and the Amazon. To make sense of connections between the archaeological past and present-day heritage within contemporary Maya communities, there is a need to understand the interconnectivity among hemispheric cultures previously considered isolated from each other in early Preclassical times (roughly 2,000–1,000 BCE), as well as—simplifying it somewhat in this claim to convey the sense of my argument—the extant continuity in Maya organization of sociopolitical territories, local communities, regions, and configuration of states.

The books included here exemplify the broad scope of these advancements in astronomy and the history of science (Aldana); linguistics (Fash and Tokovinine); archaeology, Maya art history, and the Late Postclassic period (Chinchilla, Doyle, and Pillsbury); and cultural history (O'Neil). Together, they undermine an old Eurocentric imposition whereby "Ancient Maya" were "good," while contemporary

• Framing MarkReading the Africanist Presence in Early American Broadsides
• Rebecca M. Rosen (bio)

As formal, occasional documents that attempt to contain acts of racialized legal violence, early American texts produced—and in a sense demanded—by carceral systems and their literary adherents present challenges to modern scholars. Whether created or distributed by ministers, jurists, newspaper editors, or printers, such documents often provide proof of resistance by their subjects to spoken and embodied co-option while they also, paradoxically, hold up these subjects as mouthpieces for salvific surrender. This essay examines two such texts, the broadsides produced in conjunction with the executions of two African American people, Mark and Phillis, for poisoning and killing their notoriously cruel enslaver, Captain John Codman, in September 1755: namely, a poem, A Few lines on occasion of the untimely end of Mark and Phillis, and an execution narrative, The Last & Dying Words of mark, Aged about 30 Years.¹ While they take different forms—one, a work of memorial poetry that excoriates Mark and Phillis as representative symbols of African American revolt and punitive anatomy (the practice of anatomizing the bodies of the condemned as an extra layer of punishment); the other, a mediated autobiographical document that represents Mark's life as one of public utility and exemplarity—both broadsides attempt to reduce acts of self-liberation to punitive object lessons. In an effort to recover the voices of self-liberating subjects, how are we to approach such documents?

This essay applies two of Toni Morrison's key concepts from Playing in the Dark (1992) that distill the concomitant development of racial slavery and racialized tropes in American fiction—American Africanism and the Africanist presence—to grapple with that question. Morrison presents the two concepts as interlocking and overlapping. The first of these concepts provides a means of examining the ways that, as Morrison puts it, [End Page 419] "American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless" (7). That is, American Africanism is a way of presenting Black subjects that precludes their specificity and agency, rendering them background characters and yet essential to white plots, metaphorical and literal. Morrison goes on to define the "Africanist presence" as representing, for white writers, what is always there and never acknowledged. That is, "Africanist presence" is denoted by white writers' stunted and self-negating efforts to acknowledge the existence of Black subjects and interlocutors, an endeavor Morrison

Reviewed by:

• Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes
• Geoffrey Sanborn (bio)

Powerful cultural concepts sometimes slow the forward motion of one's thinking as one approaches them. When I try to explain to other people what I think about plagiarism—that it is the flip side of a cultural fetishization of originality, that it is not always criminal or indecent, that the ban on it in academic settings has productive value but the fierceness of the banning does not—everything seems to turn into wet, thick sand. I have trouble holding on to my thoughts. The thickness of the opprobrium that the concept of plagiarism generates makes it extremely difficult to speak, listen, and speak more. So when I get the chance to read a book like Claudia Stokes's Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, I'm grateful not only for what it adds to my knowledge but also for the thinking environment it makes available to me. Along with books like Robert Macfarlane's Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and Paul Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (2003), Stokes's Old Style unfolds a space in which counterintuitive, countercultural thoughts about (un)originality can roam and mingle a bit more freely.

One of the appealing aspects of Old Style is that Stokes seems to enjoy certain kinds of unoriginal writing—not plagiarism, which she describes as "outright fraud" (62), but writing that stays close to approved examples, writing that echoes the sound and sense of the literary past. When she describes what she means by unoriginality—"the enlistment of time-honored topics and narratives handed down through the generations; the deliberate invocation of signature styles and forms; quotation and allusion; and even the overt reconstruction of familiar texts or earlier literary periods" [End Page 500] (3)—she does so with the fondness and precision of a connoisseur. It is a compelling way of easing readers into a more intimate experience of works whose aesthetics are not our own. Before we pass judgment on a conventionally written work from the nineteenth century, Stokes argues, we should try to get closer to it, to sense the value of once-popular modes of expression.

Throughout Old Style, Stokes models that process of understanding for us, moving from writer to writer (Lucretia Davidson, Catherine Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfell

Reviewed by:

• Rip Van Winkle's Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory ed. by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
• Leila Mansouri (bio)

Edited by historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Rip Van Winkle's Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory marks the bicentennial of the 1819 publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. with an interdisciplinary collection of essays that engage both the historical Irving and his writing's continued multifaceted resonance with American audiences. The volume is an outgrowth of a canceled 2020 symposium that had been set to be held at Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit that promotes and seeks to educate the public on Hudson Valley historic landmarks. It includes work not only from academic historians and literary scholars but also from two members of Historic Hudson Valley's staff, the principal historian of a Westchester County public history project focused on the Revolutionary War, and Hollywood actor and screenwriter Curtis Armstrong, who has sought to adapt Irving's work. These contributors collectively stake out a conversation that bridges what usually is a sharp divide between scholarship on the early American period and the reception of early American authors in popular culture and present-day public events. In doing so, their essays offer a set of trenchant but contradictory answers to the question that animates the collection's preface: Why does Washing-ton Irving still matter?

Readers of Early American Literature likely take one of those answers for granted: Irving matters because his writings still offer scholars productive entry into key aspects of early US literature and society. Rip Van Winkle's Republic presents a number of fresh and compelling readings of The Sketch Book—including of its two most famous stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Two standouts among these are Michelle Sizemore's "Rites and Times of the Grand Tour" and Elizabeth L. Bradley's "Tracing Northern Slavery in the Knickerbocker Stories." In the former, Sizemore situates The Sketch Book, which Irving composed during an extended trip to Europe, in relation to the rise of the Grand Tour, which in the wake of the American Revolution became a rite of passage for white, [End Page 495] well-off young American men seeking to connect with what they saw as their cultural and civilizational forebears. Attending especially to The Sketch Book's depictions of England, Sizemore argues that

Abstract:

The prominence of dissent and the reconciliation of dissent in John Winthrop's History of New England serves as a useful reminder that Massachusetts was not as monolithic as is often thought and that colony's ability to cope with differences of religious opinion was important to the way it represented itself. Instance of reconciliation in the History also have a face-saving effect in that they cast the colonial government as a reasonable and patient judge of permissible versus intolerable dissent while, at the same time, casting irreconcilable difference as unreasonable and self-interested, and therefore punishable. This essay studies how reconciliation events in the History work rhetorically to validate the colonial government's power both by displaying its capacity for tolerance and by defining the reasonable limits of what is tolerable.

Abstract:

One of the disputed elements of Crèvecoeur's biography is the question of whether or not he was ever adopted by the Oneida. In this article, I review the evidence in favor of his adoption and trace the history of this claim. I use a linguistically driven approach to argue that this evidence is unsuitable, and I provide previously unused evidence to suggest that, although he may have been granted an Indigenous name, he was never really adopted by, or even particularly familiar with, the Oneida. In this way, I aim to encourage the broader consideration of linguistics in interpreting historical texts and understanding the past, while highlighting the importance of Indigenous languages to the study of early American texts.

• The Din of Pasts CollidingLatin American Histories Urbane, Archival, and Sacral
• Dana Leibsohn (bio)

To say that scholarship on material and visual culture is under pressure can surprise no one. Institutions holding artworks and Indigenous belongings from colonial settings worldwide face calls for redress, with increasing frequency and at times hostility. For Latin Americanists, repatriation catches the most frequent headlines. Yet ownership is only one trip hazard in this rocky terrain. Expertise developed through long hours of study—the once (seemingly) indisputable foundation for knowledge-creation—stills hold sway. Not for everyone, though. Not anymore. Writing about the Global South from intellectual and physical settings in the Global North rarely gets the pass it once did. Moreover, in Chile and Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico, national governments and local communities vie as often as they agree over ancestral heirlooms (not to mention land and sovereignty). When détente is forged, as it sometimes is, claims [End Page 137] to autonomy in Indigenous and Black communities pull into clearer view, but so, too, do the thirsty, sprawling roots of mestizaje. Things are messy, indeed. No less so because, as Avexnim Cojti Ren (Maya K'iche') reminds us, scholarship can have political and legal consequences in Latin America that extend well beyond any expressed academic, institutional, or museological intentions.¹

For readers of this journal, many of whom are well versed in Indigenous studies, this topography may appear unfamiliar, perhaps even belated. I can imagine a similar point voiced by archaeologists of Latin America, many of whom have become veterans at negotiating ethical and political debates. In art and architectural history, the disciplines featured in this review, the situation seems muddier. Among those who write about materials that predate Latin American nationhood—materials typically called (in English) ancient and colonial visual culture—there is wary recognition of shifting landscapes. For instance, many scholars now know that not every artwork or architectural space that sparks interest (or that "matters for their research") is as available for their interpretation as in times past. And collaborative work with Black and Indigenous