Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Marion Rust For the second issue of 2021, we have many exciting awards to announce. The Early American Literature Book Prize for 2020 has been awarded to Lindsay DiCuirci, an associate professor of English at UMBC (the University of Maryland, Baltimore County), for Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth Century Lives of Early American Books, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 323 of this issue. Congratulations, Professor DiCuirci! The Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature has awarded its 2019 Richard Beale Davis Prize, which honors the best essay to appear in Early American Literature in a single year, to two cowinners: Reed Gochberg, for "Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's 'Curious Book' and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet," and Ana Schwartz, for "Mercy as Well as Extremity": Forts, Fences, and Fellow Feeling in New England Settlement." Both essays appeared in EAL 54, no. 2 (2019). A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 325 of this issue. Congratulations, Professors Gochberg and Schwartz! Congratulations are also due to Ajay Kumar Batra, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, on winning the American Literature Society's yearly 1921 Award for Best Essay in American Literature (untenured category) for "Reading with Conviction: Abraham Johnstone and the Poetics of the Dead End." This essay appeared in Early American Literature's special issue "Beyond Recovery" (55, no. 2), guest edited by Professors Steffi Dippold and Lauren Coats. Thanks to the ALS for sponsoring this award, to the guest editors for including it in their special issue, and to Ajay Kumar Batra for his fine work. The EAL issue here is hard to sum up. Its four essays in the field of Black studies address crowd action (Betsy Erkkila), multispecies narrative (Kyle Keeler), scholarly projection (Rio Bergh), and embodied Black knowledge (Samantha Pinto). Two other contributions correct long-standing [End Page 327] misappraisals of key texts in the field: early seventeenth-century iconoclast Thomas Morton's May Day poem (Robert Hudson Vincent) and the anonymous post-Revolutionary "Panther Captivity" narrative (Alex Gergely). A revisionary assessment of fictional interventions in eighteenthcentury theories of consciousness (Matthew Rebhorn), a teasing out of literary nationalist satirical employments of the British Gothic (Ellen Bulford Welch), a review of new methodologies in the study of natural history (Elizabeth Polcha) and a cowritten twenty-first-century "beast fable" in the voice of a raven and a bobolink (Chi-Ming Yang and Sarah Rivett) round out the list. Taken together, these works overlap in their engagements with animal studies, Black studies, cognitive literary studies, gender studies, genre studies, natural history studies, settler colonial studies, textual criticism, Wampanoag studies, and more. This issue attests to the range, as well as quality, of work now going on in the capacious field of early American literary studies. I commend it to your attention. [End Page 328] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press