EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE最新文献

• Notes on Contributors

ben bascom is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University, where he teaches American literature and queer studies. His forthcoming book, Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (Oxford UP), depicts a queer and messy world of social outcasts and eccentric personalities all striving for public attention.

michael boyden is a professor of English at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author of Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics (Oxford UP, 2022). He has also edited a collected volume titled Climate and American Literature (Cambridge UP, 2020) and a special issue of Early American Literature titled "New Natural History" (2019).

anna brickhouse teaches English and American studies at the University of Virginia. She is currently completing a book titled "Elsewhere Catastrophe: Earthquake and the Invention of America."

ryan carr is a Lecturer-in-Discipline in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches classes in Indigenous studies and early American literature and in the Core Curriculum. His first book, a study of the Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom, is due out with Columbia University Press in early 2024.

vin carretta is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. His recent publications include The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary (U of Georgia P, 2010), coedited with Ty M. Reese; an edition of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (Broadview P, 2015); Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (U of Georgia P, 2005; rev. ed. 2022); Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (Penguin, 1995; rev. eds. 2003, 2020); an edition of The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Penguin, 2019; rev. ed. 2023); and Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (U of Georgia P, 2011, rev. eds. 2014, 2023).

jeannine delombard is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is affiliated faculty in the History Department. She specializes in African American and pre-1900 American literature, with a particular interest in the intersections of slavery, law, and culture. She is the author of In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (U of Pennsylvania P, 2012) and Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (U of North Carolina P, 2007). She is currently completing the first of a pair of book projects that examine the democratization of dignity in ninet

Reviewed by:

• Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English Settlement and Native Resistance from the Mayflower to King Philip's War ed. by Lisa Brooks and Kelly Wisecup
• Ryan Carr (bio)

This massive volume is strange, heterogeneous, and compelling. Published by the redoubtable Library of America to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival in North America, Plymouth Colony was edited by Lisa Brooks and Kelly Wisecup, two leading scholars of the Native Northeast, who have assembled an anthology of primary sources that invites readers to rethink the volume's titular theme. The book's main editorial goal is announced in the subtitle of its introduction—"Plymouth in Patuxet: A Reorientation"—and it succeeds in this goal admirably, recontextualizing the history of the colony as a relatively "short-lived" episode transpiring within the homelands of the Wampanoag and other peoples living in the southeastern part of what the colonists called "New England" (xv, 1021).

While the book includes several well-known colonial texts (James Rosier's True Relation, Edward Winslow's Good News from New England, William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, and Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God among them), its most important scholarly contribution is to publish these alongside lesser-known writings that reflect Indigenous peoples' historical agency in Patuxet—the region surrounding Plymouth—from the early seventeenth century down to the present day. Some of these texts were cited in Brooks's recent study of King Philip's War, Our Beloved Kin (Yale UP, 2018), but are published here for the very first time in their entirety. Included are deeds and treaties, records of councils held by Native and settler leaders, creation [End Page 225] stories inspired by Wampanoag oral tradition, diplomatic correspondence written during King Philip's War, and later reflections by northeastern Native writers about the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. Some Herring Pond Wampanoag writings concerning Plymouth are missing here, including those collected and translated in Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon's Native Writings in Massachusett (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 185, 1988), which document some of the earliest experiences of Native American communities subject to Protestant missionization. It would be interesting to k

Reviewed by:

• What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer by Ann Myles
• Rebecca M. Rosen (bio)

Most readers of Early American Literature have encountered Mary Barrett Dyer, a follower of Anne Hutchinson, in the records of the Antinomian Controversy of 1636–38 sparked by Hutchinson's preaching. Hutchinson's ministerial trials—capped off by the discovery and exhumation of Dyer's non-normative stillbirth, delivered by Hutchinson in her work as a midwife, and buried on the advice of John Cotton—cemented popular conceptions of both women as vessels of unauthorized and unorthodox speech, rendering Dyer, "the woman who had the Monster," physical proof of spiritual error's toll on the human form (John Winthrop, Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, and [End Page 227] Libertines [Ralph Smith, 1644]). Scholars of early American and Quaker studies will also recognize Mary Dyer as one of the four members of the Society of Friends executed in Boston from 1660 to 1661, eulogized afterward as martyrs. Though a highly visible presence in both those conflicts, Dyer's own story has never been easy to trace.

Now, in her poetry collection What Woman That Was, Anne Myles gives us the chance not only to encounter Dyer, but also to know her. She gives voice to Dyer, using both her recorded words (from two letters to the Massachusetts General Court) and the imagined encounters she could have had with the texts, figures, and movements of her many times and places. These include the well-documented trials involving not only the accused antinomian Hutchinson, alongside whom she was banished from Massachusetts, but also the trials of fellow executed Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra, as well as several epochs of nonconformist settler colonial conflicts across the Atlantic world. These poems allow us to see Dyer fully, setting caricature and sensational reportage aside (though Myles has illustrated that dichotomy for us before, in "From Monster to Martyr: Re-presenting Mary Dyer," her 2001 article in this journal (vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1–30). Verse allows Myles to recast Dyer as a radical ancestor, achingly present to many who wish to be heard and seen. As "The Prologue: May-shine" suggests, these poems attempt to retrieve "the book of lost words," squaring Dyer's centrality to two major nonconformist power struggles with the glaring absence of her own testimony from the records that cover all but the last months of her life (9).

Dyer, as ventriloquized and met in conversation by Myles, is not a mute victim or zealot. Instead, she is a mysti

Reviewed by:

• American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 ed. by William Huntting Howell and Greta Lafleur
• Patrick M. Erben (bio)

Reading American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 feels like attending a conference of the Society of Early Americanists or C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists: the variety of critical and scholarly approaches, diversity of contributors, and breadth of subjects demonstrate the vitality and maturation of the field of early American studies. Howell and LaFleur's collection should put to rest debates about whether our field suffers a theory deficit and neglects aesthetics and form. The volume's essays adroitly handle topics as wide-ranging as using queer crip theory and decolonizing Native literary aesthetics; they also sharpen our attention to genre with a scope of themes including paranoid style and revival hymn poetics. The volume's wealth of information, density of primary text references, and bibliographic coverage also equip anyone teaching early American literature courses with fresh pedagogical impulses and a wellspring of spin-off subjects to guide undergraduate and graduate research; as with good teaching, the essays assiduously note the greater amount of work remaining to be done on a variety of topics, texts, authors, and archives. Yet [End Page 167] herein also lies a bit of the crux: to achieve this coverage, individual essays perform a feat of scholarly compression that is sometimes difficult to unpack. As the volume is part of a larger anthological series, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition (edited by Cody Marrs), this comes as no surprise; indeed, one can sense each writer's struggle to distill their knowledge into such compact servings. After reading this volume, one may crave the scholarly expansion found in the authors' longer-form work in journals and monographs, for which the essays collected here serve as a veritable amuse-bouche. My "how to use this book" advice is to sample from its rich menu according to critical taste, scholarly interest, and pedagogical demands.

What I appreciate most about Howell and LaFleur's introduction is the way they foreground their personal motivations, the present political stakes of scholarly work on the US national founding period, and the dialoguing between "cultural instability" (15) in the present and the many transformations of the early national period. The volume understands its episodic approach ("exposure and assemblage") as a corrective to the "consensus history" that, especially in pr

Reviewed by:

• Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Justine S. Murison
• Ray Horton (bio)

"Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again," exclaimed a banner at the Women's March on Inauguration Day in January 2016. One of the great protest slogans to emerge from the presidency of Donald Trump, this comparison between the regressive state of Gilead in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the future portended by Trump's coziness with the Christian Right illuminates a key tension within American secularism. On the one hand, in a secular age, many people routinely think of religious faith as a matter of private rather than public concern; on the other hand, as Justine Murison argues in the introduction of Faith in Exposure, "secularism is not so much the absence of religion from the public sphere … but is instead a prescriptive orientation to the world" (4), one that presumes religion's banishment to the private sphere even as it enables "secular institutions to retain their Protestant structures" (7). The nightmare invoked by The Handmaid's Tale and the protest signs it inspired hinge on the danger that the private religious convictions of some, by way of the public mechanisms of politics and law, will trump the right to privacy enjoyed by others, especially where the right to privacy concerns gender, sexuality, and reproduction.

In Faith in Exposure, Murison historicizes this contested terrain between privacy and secularism in American literature and culture, explaining "how, over the course of the nineteenth century, privacy came to encompass such contradictions—underpinning the right to sexual and reproductive rights but also undermining them in the name of religious freedom" (1). To this end, Murison's thorough and persuasive cultural history of religion and privacy in the nineteenth century proves to be a master class in what Victorianists affiliated with the V21 Collective call "strategic presentism," an approach to literary history that highlights how contemporary concerns animate our investment in questions about earlier periods ("Manifesto of the V21 Collective," http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/). For Murison, "a study of the nineteenth-century [End Page 187] American novel," which she calls "the literary form most closely associated with modern subjectivity and the private lives of individuals" (2), not only reveals how fiction happened to respond to nineteenth-century debates about privacy; it also illuminates the religious subtext of tw

Reviewed by:

• The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse
• Aston Gonzalez (bio)

With the publication of The First Reconstruction, scholars now have a more comprehensive resource to study the role that free African American men in some northern states played in voting and contributing to party politics before the Civil War. Time and again, Van Gosse [End Page 181] demonstrates that electoral wins hinged on securing the ballots cast by African American men in several northern city, county, and state elections during the early Republic. Gosse provides abundant evidence that African American men voted and participated in electoral politics. He details how they recorded their own participation and also how white allies and adversaries positioned the promises and perceived perils of Black voters within changing two- and three-party systems that sometimes operated quite differently across state lines. Gosse avoids sectional generalizations and organizes the book according to the four polities of Pennsylvania, upper New England, New York, and Ohio. The contours of Black politics look different in each area, shaped as they were by preexisting laws, specific goals of political parties, diverse legal structures, and other contingent circumstances of the local populations. What comes into focus is how African American voters maneuvered strategically within and between political parties—Federalist, Whig, Democratic, Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican—in an attempt to secure improved outcomes for themselves and to try to elect politicians who supported their interests.

In a strong narrative voice, Gosse argues that these histories of dynamic Black politics in select northern enclaves have been overlooked for several reasons. First, he stridently writes that "we [scholars] have all been Taneyites" (referring to Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision) who have assumed and "insisted that black citizenship barely, rarely, or never existed" before taking aim at scholars' expansive understanding of "politics" to include African American agency beyond the ballot box. This, he argues, results in social history without the "old-style political history" (9). In response, Gosse narrows the scope of what counts as "politics" in order to focus on elections, voting, and political parties. The view presented in the book is exclusively male with a handful of references to Black women's presence. Second, two competing historiograph

Reviewed by:

• Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture by Michaël Roy
• Bryan Sinche (bio)

Following in the wake of scholarly leaders like I. Garland Penn, Dorothy Porter, and Marian Starling came a new generation of Black print culture specialists who have expanded and shaped the field. Articles and books by William L. Andrews, John Ernest, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Frances Smith Foster, Eric Gardner, Leon Jackson, and Joycelyn Moody—along with the emergence of searchable digital databases—have helped inspire a flurry of scholarship that shows no signs of abating. To wit: Benjamin Fagan's The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (U of Georgia P, 2016), Gardner's Black Print Unbound (Oxford UP, 2015), and Derrick Spires's The Practice of Citizenship (U of Pennsylvania P, 2019) have fueled an interest in Black newspapers and periodicals, and collections like Early African American Print Culture (ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [U of Pennsylvania P, 2012]), The Colored Conventions Movement (ed. Jim Casey, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Sarah Patterson [U of North Carolina P, 2021]), and Against a Sharp White Background (Brigette Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne [U of Wisconsin P, 2019]) have further expanded our understanding of the genres and forms in which African American writing appeared. The effect of much of this work has been to reconsider the role of the slave narrative in pre-1900 African American literature. Michaël Roy's Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture helps to further this critical project by attending to the materiality and diversity of antebellum narratives.

Roy's monograph is a revised version of Textes Fugitifs, first published in France in 2017. The American edition, translated by Susan Pickford, [End Page 210] updates the scholarly apparatus, but it is largely unchanged from the 2017 publication that won the research prize of the Association Française D'Études Américaines. As Roy notes, his book fills a major gap in African American literary scholarship, as it is the first monograph focused on the printing, distribution, circulation, sale, and reception of the texts we have come to call "slave narratives." Moreover, Roy complicates that term throughout Fugitive Texts, arguing that to understand the genre in all its complexity, we must attend to the narratives' publication histories. Roy argues that a "book history approach to the antebellum slave narratives … illuminat

Reviewed by:

• Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock
• Scott M. Larson (bio)

Beginning in December 1811, a series of powerful earthquakes shook New Madrid, Missouri. The tremblors were physically felt for hundreds of miles, and in Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America, Jonathan Todd Hancock aims to explore the wide-ranging impacts of these quakes among Native American societies and the young United States. Relatively few people died in the New Madrid earthquakes, particularly in comparison with the destruction of massive quakes that struck Lima, Peru, and Lisbon, Portugal in the eighteenth century, which themselves prompted extensive religious and natural scientific inquiries. The New Madrid quakes nevertheless threw the land and its inhabitants into turmoil. Since the earthquakes occurred alongside the Comet of 1811, the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811, and escalating United States military engagements with Native American and European powers, interpreters saw the 1811–12 tremblors as signs connected to national, moral, and political upheaval. Some considered them fulfillments of dire prophecies. Hancock explores the range of meanings that were ascribed to the earthquakes and "probes those meanings to provide a continental, cross-cultural perspective on prophecy and revivalism, state formations, and understandings of environmental change across Native American, African American, and Euro American societies in the early nineteenth century" (3).

Beyond the immediate events of the earthquakes, which occurred between December 1811 and February 1812 and consisted primarily of three powerful tremors estimated at 7.0 on the Richter scale, the book is divided thematically, tackling the different arenas in which the earthquakes were understood and its influences felt. Hancock organizes the book into sections on "knowledge," "spirit," "politics," and "territory," and within each of these chapters, Hancock gives attention to the conflicting and overlapping ways that a range of American actors engaged the earthquakes. This approach offers a diverse view of early American cultural responses to [End Page 192] the earthquakes. Hancock draws on a wide range of both published and unpublished primary sources, and he is careful to note that many of the primary accounts of the earthquakes were unreliable and that some were published for sensation rather than for veracity. Hancock also attends to ethical considerations of engaging Indigenous knowledge, reminding the reader

• The 2023 SEA Common Reading ForumOn Toni Morrison's A Mercy
• Anna Brickhouse (bio), April Langley (bio), and Kaitlin Tonti (bio)

a mercy

if you don't read this no one will.(one question: can you read?)this story begins in a language Ican't recall but I will tryto build a house of wordsanyway. it is the only way.on the cobblestones of umamemória portuguesa a minha mãeheld close to one life as the otherdrifted away. it was the only way.someone says dominion is wickedbut what she doesn't understand isthat the wilderness inside can bewicked, too. the wilderness ofletting go. so there is no protection herebut there is difference and if I can justremember the contours of thisportuguese memory it will makeall the difference. a man lovedme once, minha mãe, and so toodid women, but he shatteredat the dying inside and the others,at the dying without. those whopray to god say it is the only way.I say it is cruel. unforgiving.(another question: who is responsible?) [End Page 95] so in a moment like the crackingof creation my feathers unfoldedand I too became unforgiving.unforgiven. it was no miracle,minha mãe. it was simply the only way.my company now is the words that caress meand the darkness that thickens butdon't be afraid. if you don't readthis no one will and before it burnsI want you to understand:my soul is hard as cypress nowand I am free at last. I last.oh minha mãe. meu amor.hear a Florens. in full.this is the only wayand I last.

—Madeline Stokes

The poem above, by undergraduate Madeline Stokes (University of Virginia), represents one product of the SEA's 2023 Common Reading Initiative. The initiative is still new, imagined and then created in the year leading up to the 2021 conference by Cassander Smith, Brigitte Fielder, and Tara Bynum. These scholars and others, taking on the project of "conference organizing for change," aimed to create a sense of community centered on a single text while also broadening the intellectual approaches and perspectives shaping the SEA—including those of contemporary writers as well as scholars and undergraduate and graduate students focused on other periods. In 2023 the organizing text was

Reviewed by:

• The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence by David Waldstreicher
• Vincent Carretta (bio)

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence, by David Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY, is both timely and necessary. Timely because his is one of two biographies published during the 250th anniversary of Wheatley Peters's annus mirabilis, the year in which she both published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and gained her freedom; necessary because of Cornelia H. Dayton's most significant biographical discoveries about her later life and marriage found since the publication in 2011 of the first full-length biography of the poet (Dayton, "Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton," New England Quarterly, vol. 94, 2021). Waldstreicher's biography is also a major contribution to the recent fictional, critical, pedagogical, and scholarly attention Wheatley Peters has received in Honorée Fannone Jeffers's imaginative biography in verse, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020); a special issue of Early American Literature (vol. 57, no. 3, 2022); a new attribution argument by Wendy Raphael Roberts (Early American Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2023); my revised edition of The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters [End Page 154] (Oxford UP, 2024); and my revised Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (U of Georgia P, 2023).

By publishing The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley with a nonacademic press, Waldstreicher will make more widely available a portrait of Wheatley Peters and her times familiar to the readers of Early American Literature who have followed the biographical, critical, and editorial work on her published in more academic venues during the past few decades, especially in the last dozen years. Waldstreicher graciously acknowledges that his biography of Wheatley Peters is based on the earliest edition of my own, as well as on my editions of her writings. Waldstreicher's view of Wheatley Peters, too, is that she is a skillful rhetorician and commentator claiming her place—subtly, when necessary, more overtly whenever possible—at the center rather than the margins of the literary, political, and social worlds in which she finds herself. She's a savvy businesswoman who exerts as much control over her life as she can, given her race, age, gender, and social status.

Waldstrei