EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE最新文献

Reviewed by:

• On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant
• Ana Schwartz (bio)

Where does history end and personality begin? This isn't exactly Lauren Berlant's question in On the Inconvenience of Other People. But for those of us reading from the field of early American studies, it's a question we may find occasion to return to, if we've asked it to ourselves quietly before. That we tend not to ask it explicitly in our work is, like our own individual personalities' tussles with history, not exactly our fault. Methodologically, our field indirectly still seems to be wrestling with its own historical foundation in hagiographic intellectual history, its prior ambition to vindicate the mind and its personal expressions against historical forces, to keep drawing, as Emerson expressively put it, new circles. The mood of this historiography is earnest. Everyone it narrates is sincere. There are few [End Page 204] protagonists here who aren't white. Since then, the field has reinvested in something like historical materialism, has begun seeking more comprehensively to recover the material conditions and their ideological consequences that together shaped the history we've inherited. We've widened our scope. "Everyone" now includes those not so richly documented in the sources earlier critics had used to write their accounts of the past. And because those underrepresented in the archive faced concomitant material predations and dispossessions, we often find it powerful to generalize about the mood and material expression of resistance that these individuals shared.

The challenge here, though—and it's one we're beginning to take on better in the twenty-first century—is to begin to understand historical individuals experientially, to appreciate better the contours of their lived histories within those unchosen conditions. The answers may not always be pleasant. The parties we have spent our lives understanding may turn out to be less individually heroic than we have wanted to believe them to be. And where, to extend my lease on Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best's most searing critique of our desires in historicist recovery projects, would be the heroism for us in that? This is a rhetorical question, mostly, but it's also a screen for an earnest inquiry. The place where history ends and personality begins might also be the weird surprise-filled place where we see the leap beyond historical circumscription that, for some famous figures of the past, bound the otherwise unglamorous individual with partially circumstantial heroism. And there of course were many who didn't make that leap. There we might see bett

Abstract:

This essay examines two prominent literary narratives and tropes at the turn of the nineteenth century that constellate around the seduction plot and the hermit narrative. These two ostensibly discrete narrative forms have a curious history as they play out in the printed iterations of the Elizabeth Wilson and William Wilson stories, two siblings whose lives were marked by differing forms of tragedy. By bringing together a tale of seduction, execution, and hermitic living, I show how the account of Elizabeth Wilson's execution for infanticide shifted from being a seduction plot to a frame tale for a hermit narrative about her brother. This narrative turn moves from an account that focuses on the policing of female sexuality to instead emphasize the curious life of a man who refuses social intercourse. But that shift actually signals something more complicated about how the early Republic sought to instill ways of feeling about gender and deviance.

• Richard Beale Davis Prize for 2022
• Tara Bynum, Ana Schwartz (bio), and Michelle Sizemore

Awarded to: Rebecca Rosen

Honorable Mention: Camille Owens

From the magnificent volume of essays published in volume 57 of Early American Literature, the 2022 Richard Beale Davis Prize is awarded to Rebecca Rosen for "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven': Speaking and Discovering Infanticide in the Early American Northeast." The prize committee gives the distinction of Honorable Mention to Camille Owens for "'I, Young in Life': Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood." These essays are exemplary for their originality as well as their archival heft and acumen—most of all, for bringing to the fore underexamined topics now certain to have their due in the field owing to the remarkable groundwork of these investigations.

In her riveting study "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven,'" Rebecca Rosen examines cruentation (the belief that a corpse bleeds in proximity of the murderer) as a form of testimony in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century infanticide literature. Known as "the blood cry," cruentation functions as a postmortem method of investigation joining the corporeal expressions of blood and speech. A sign from God, the blood cry becomes incontrovertible legal evidence that privileges the voices of deceased infants over and above the voices of accused mothers "in a move anticipating fetal personhood claims of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" (86). In effect, Rosen argues, infanticide sermons and their cultural narratives raise the status of dead infants to public speakers and citizens while relegating women suspects to nonentities. Among its many strengths, Rosen's essay draws attention to the dead body as authoritative material evidence after the Salem Witch Trials, earning cruentation a place in Puritan judicial inquiry tantamount to the [End Page 7] spectral evidence in the trials. Rosen's attentiveness to the archive of infanticide sermons and other execution literature, as well as her commitment to reading her sources against the louder words of the famous Mathers, demonstrate the force of the blood cry in stifling condemned women or else permitting their speech only in acts of self-condemnation. Above all, the essay skillfully recontextualizes and historicizes Christian investments in voice as a metonymy for subjectivity, tracing how those investments in future children have long come at the cost of care for the adults, usually women, responsible for bearing them. For the committee, this work could not have been more powerful or timely.

Camille Owens's article, "'I, Young in Life," centers Phillis Wheatley in the

Reviewed by:

• The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A: Beginnings to 1820 ed. by Derrick R. Spires et al.
• Abram van Engen (bio)

The new Broadview Anthology of American Literature is a thing to behold. I mean that quite literally. After all our studies of book history—knowing how much the material product matters—we nonetheless stuck [End Page 233] for years to the same basic format: tiny print, crammed pages, and a weighty tome. The new Broadview, while still weighty, does not feel crammed. It uses double columns and wide pages to make the text seem almost inviting. I might pick this anthology over others on that basis alone, hoping it would lessen student dread when they start to read. But beyond a better feel, the double column also enables comparisons of related texts and side-by-side translations. I mean this sincerely: a change in format may seem small, but it makes a big difference.

So what do these columns actually contain? Seeking as wide a representation as possible, the editors have included a huge array of diverse voices, some of which have not appeared in prior anthologies (see below for a list of new authors). It is an excellent and exhaustive account of what Karin Wulf has called "vast early America" ("Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality," Humanities, vol. 40, no. 2, Winter 2019, https://www.neh.gov/article/vast-early-america), and it is governed, as the editors note, by according "a place of utmost significance to slavery, the legacy of slavery, and, more generally, the ongoing struggle for equality" (xxxi). Such a theme was not ignored by other anthologies, but it has never been given so much emphasis.

Several principles of selection surround that theme: keeping the most-taught texts, adding space for once-popular authors (so much Longfellow!), and pushing forward some writers "who we believe deserve to be more widely taught" (xxvi) or who "have been unjustly neglected" (xxxii). The end result is an extraordinary display of the well-known and the little-considered. To make space for so much material, the anthology includes a large website portion, edited like the physical text. Authors on the website

• Editors' Note
• Cassander Smith and Katy Chiles

We are thrilled to be the new Coeditors of Early American Literature! We feel honored to continue the journal's tradition of publishing outstanding early American scholarship, and we are committed to continue innovating EAL by emphasizing new methodologies, archives, and objects of study and by amplifying new communities of scholars. As many of our readers already know, Early American Literature is over fifty years old and has been edited by stellar scholars such as Everett Emerson, Philip Gura, David Shields, Sandra Gustafson, and Marion Rust (about whom we write more below). The official journal of both the Society of Early Americanists and the Modern Language Association's Forum on Early American literature, EAL publishes on a wide array of literary and cultural topics through the early national period. We are proud to carry this esteemed journal into its next phase.

This distinguished history has most recently occurred under the editorship of Marion Rust, EAL's outgoing editor. We want to honor Marion on her retirement from the profession and also thank her for the extraordinary job she has done editing Early American Literature from July 2018 to July 2023 and volumes 54 through 58. Building on the journal's success, Marion introduced new features and continued to move the journal to study what Karin Wulf has called "Vast Early America." She introduced the section titled "Inventions," which provides a venue that features work from creative writers, who also study and imagine early America in ways that differ from but also complement the work of academics; "Inventions" has featured the writing of Chet'la Sebree, Leanne Howe, and Demaris Hill, just to name a few. She also worked with various coeditors to produce spectacular special issues on topics such as "Reframing 1620" and "Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley (Peters) Studies Now." In addition to these innovations, Marion also recognized the ways in which various systems of oppression and historical exclusion can inadvertently shape a journal and began a process for evaluating EAL to make sure that the journal both reflects the [End Page 1] diversity of thought that is early American studies and opens the door for new scholarly voices. Like Marion, we recognize this commitment to inclusivity as key to the journal's continued vitality and are dedicated to that evaluative process.

We thank Marion for her mentorship and allyship. She provides a model of someone who balanced being a scholar, teacher, university citizen, activist, parent, editor, and humane person. For 2022–24, the SEA Essay Contest is named in memory of Sarah Schuetze, one of Marion's former students, and the prize for the Sarah S

Abstract:

This essay presents Robert Beverley's 1705 The History and Present State of Virginia as a case study of the role Indigenous ancestral remains serve for both colonial attempts at control and as teachers for current anticolonial scholarly approaches. Analyzing his depiction of Powhatan ancestral remains, this piece first argues that Beverley presents Powhatan ancestors as solely bones, that is, as transferable and general "objects" that serve as a synecdoche for removed Indigenous populations at large. However, despite Beverley's brief and abstracting descriptions, I argue that these moments continue to register the prolonged attention and ongoing care that Powhatan relations undertake for their ancestors, underscoring the presence of what I call testimonies of remaining care. These testimonies, I argue, break apart settler erasures by attesting to the kinship that always continues to surround Powhatan ancestors. Reframing texts like Beverley's as narratives that depend on Indigenous life rather than death, this article demonstrates how ancestral relations testify to the structural grounding of Indigenous communities and care work to narratives that seek to obscure them.

Reviewed by:

• American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch
• Ezra Tawil (bio)

How is it possible that no one before now has written a literary history of the "fragment" in early US literature, or one which focuses on this form as important to a more broadly targeted literary history? The fact that such a question can even form itself in a reader's mind is usually a concrete sign of an author's success. In the present case, that success rests, in my view, on the combination of the argument's novelty and the obviousness of its importance to the field. Granted, the "fragment" is an intrinsically minor literary mode—indeed, it rather baldly advertises itself as such. But as any student of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transatlantic culture can attest, such openly "unfinished literary forms" (3) abound in print, as stand-alone pieces in periodicals, interpolated texts in larger works, entries in miscellanies, and so on. Interestingly, as Couch observes, the relative neglect of the subject in American literary history is not matched in transatlantic scholarship, where, for example, work on both British and German Romanticism have zeroed in on the "fragment" as a preeminent Romantic form. In bringing American Romanticism into a zone of contact with these transatlantic traditions, Couch carves out space for his critical project in a couple of ways. First, he shows that the "fragment" is not in any way an American invention or formal innovation. On the contrary, the fever for [End Page 220] fragments was an observable inclination of the Romantic literary marketplace—what Couch calls a "tradition of eighteenth-century partial writing" (2)—on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, he argues that when this interest in "unfinished forms" did cross the Atlantic, it took on a distinctly cisatlantic spin. It was not just that the public fascination with "artfully contrived fragments" (2) was observable here as part of a general transatlantic fad but also that it merged with particular streams of cultural, political, philosophical, and aesthetic thought to become an essential literary mode whose formal "minorness" belies its importance and power.

What, then, does it mean to call "unfinished forms"—and not, say, poetic epics, long prose fiction, political treatises, or other genres which seem instantly to claim more national importance—the mark of a "political aesthetic" in the early Republic, as the book's title does? Or, as Couch puts it early on: "What kind of artistic creation was a fragment, and

• Reading Race and Power in Toni Morrison's A Mercy
• Angelyn Mitchell (bio)

In her 1997 essay titled "Home," Toni Morrison wrote this sobering sentence: "I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter" (3). How it has mattered, of course, across time and across identities has been the subject of much scholarly and creative engagement. Most recently, the field of critical race studies has made more legible critical analyses of race and its intersections, and Morrison's contribution to critical race studies is immeasurable. Morrison's groundbreaking essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1987) and her book of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) are both foundational to understanding how race in the United States has "mattered" in the literary arts. Her critical interventions foreground theretofore unexamined constructions of race in American literature, especially Anglo-American literature, thus reshaping its study. In her ninth novel, A Mercy (2008), Morrison returns to the subject of race as she imagines racial constructions in the 1680s in pre-America. A Mercy was published at a historic moment—November 2008—one week after the election of the first African American president of the United States, President Barack Obama. Ironic now and unbelievable to many then, conversations of whether his election signaled a postracial America abounded. Serendipitously, Morrison's exploration of the idea of a preracial America added to this moment of historic racial significance. Discussing A Mercy upon its publication, Morrison explained that in it she was "interested in separating racism from slavery" ("Have Mercy"). In reimagining the seemingly authoritative American origins narrative, she set the novel during a time before Blackness, slavery and racism were imbricated and before slavery was legally and synonymous with Blackness. Doing so highlights the constructed nature of racist ideologies in the nation's founding and also highlights how the racial capital of [End Page 121] whiteness—its power—was central in the nation's origins.¹ In other words, material and physical privileges are central to Morrison's construction of whiteness in the novel. One might wonder whether it is possible to separate race from the institution of slavery, because we have never lived, as Morrison wrote, in a world where race did not matter.

I am interested here in thinking about how identities raced as white in the novel, despite Morrison's stated intent, depend on the synergy of the Africanist presence, her term from Playing in the Dark that signals Blackness, thus making whiteness read in legible an

Abstract:

This article draws on food studies, religious history, and research on Equiano's religious orientation to argue that Equiano's Interesting Narrative describes a creolized African and Methodist asceticism in relation to food and ritual practice. His introduction to the Moravian-Methodist love feast before his conversion resonates with his earlier textual recollections of commensality and feasting practices in his eastern Nigerian homeland. Equiano's early textual descriptions of feasting rituals suggest that he was attracted to Methodism because of his experiences through the Middle Passage and his memories of feasting practices, purification rites, and sacrifices and offerings from his childhood in Igboland. Equiano's experiences of sacrifice and his portrayals of hunger and hunger strikes as a form of resistance on the slave ships mark his choice of religious and ascetic orientation. His reclamation of the ocean as a free Black sailor, an Atlantic Creole, contributes to his interest to a temperate Methodist orientation and inner-worldly asceticism.