Annette Kolodny Research Articles

Whitewashing the Heartland

Whitewashing the Heartland Michael C. Steiner (bio) Co-authors Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno begin their book, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest, with a number of reasonable and significant claims. Among them, they argue that "the Midwest—as an imagined national middle ground, or average—is less a real collection of places and more a screen onto which various conceptions of middle-ness and average-ness are projected." (2) A few pages later, they expand this metaphor by asserting that the region has "operated as a screen or stage on which to articulate whiteness and virtue." (4) "The Midwest," they continue, "was not discovered. It was invented" and "it has been successfully reinvented again and again" (9) as an exclusionary zone of outwardly dull but dangerous whiteness. "Popular imagery and narratives of the Midwest," they argue, "have bundled together whiteness, labor, and property" into "a particular kind of racial capitalism" (9), and such whitewashing has cemented "the enduring relationship of the Midwest and whiteness in US history" and triggered an avalanche of dark consequences. (10) Building upon an earlier claim that the region "fosters projects of structural violence, from white supremacy to imperialism and nativism" (2), the authors sweepingly conclude that "[p]erceiving and imagining the Midwest has contributed to the spread of white supremacy among all Americans, as well as people elsewhere in the world." (12) The authors' fundamental purpose is to reveal the imagined or symbolic Midwest as a wellspring of White racism and open our eyes to the depths with which this imagery and ideology has saturated American culture. They hope, furthermore, that their book "will not only challenge the Midwest as a racial trope but help readers see themselves in what we write about," and that by learning to reject these harmful myths, the groundwork will be laid to use "the radical power of narrative to enlist us all in the creation of more [End Page 169] just worlds." (6) These are sweeping and worthy goals, and their study of the dark consequences of a heartland narrative and the hope to create a better one builds upon a tradition in American historical scholarship. Perhaps without knowing it, they are tracing the footsteps of a string of symbol-myth-image analysis, beginning with Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West in Symbol and Myth in 1950, continuing with Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier in 1984, and culminating with Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America in 1993. Deeply aware of the power of myth and concerned about the impact of what Smith described as a series of "collective representations" and "compelling archetypes," each of these earlier writers traced multiple versions of the myth of the heartland as an open expanse for White men to conquer at the expense of women, Native Americans, and minorities, and each pointed the way toward the creation of less destructive, more inclusive regional visions. Halvorson and Reno offer a version of this theme, but unlike their predecessors they leave little room for nuance and subtlety, and in their crusading zeal to expose the region as the fountainhead of White racism, they make a series of excessive claims that undermine their argument. Beyond ignoring the deep contributions of other regions, especially the South and the West, to this ubiquitous American and global sin, and thus enriching their argument, it is damaged by the messianic zeal with which they indict the Midwest. To make their case, they inflate the symptoms of White racism and underplay the presence and power of Black culture in the region, and these related issues of overreach and omission require deeper discussion. In the sections of the book where the authors trace mutations of White racism in language and literature—a worthy effort at the onset—they find symptoms in every turn of plain speech and stretch of flat landscape. Their warning signs of racism are so multitudinous that they become overwhelming, so ubiquitous that they threaten to become meaningless. They sweep an extensive list of midwestern traits into a grab bag of bigotry, and many...

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Forms of Opposition in American Literary Criticism

Abstract Starting from Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), this essay traces the importance of reading US literature and culture in comparative terms. Paying special attention to the work of Stuart Hall, Annette Kolodny, and F. O. Matthiessen, it argues that forms of structural opposition should be seen as embedded within American literature. Rather than understanding the subject itself in merely oppositional terms, it advocates antipodal and planetary critical perspectives that serve effectively to reposition the field within a wider context, one framed in various ways by biogenetic and environmental issues that exceed national boundaries. It concludes that while there are acute dangers for political leaders in a narrowness of vision, the same thing is true for literary criticism, where an undue narrowness of scope can be intellectually debilitating.

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts

Reviewed by: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts Christen Mucher (bio) Keywords Settler colonialism, Primordialism, Indigenous peoples, Print culture Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing. By Edward Watts. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 292. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $37.50). Edward Watts’s Colonizing the Past is one of the first monographs to apply a settler-colonial analytic to the well-worn materials of early American myth-making. Spanning U.S. literary production from 1780 to 1915, the book is a dazzling survey of the literary construct of “primordialism”— that is, “white fantasies” of the pre-Columbian past that seek to provide U.S. citizens with a whitened ancient history by displacing Indigenous pasts (4, 76). Watts divides his work into five case studies of primordialism, each of which “diminish Indians”: the myths of Welsh Indians, Lost Tribes, Mound Builders, ancient Irish colonists, and the Vikings and Normans of the Norse Revival (7). His texts range from novels and newspaper articles to poetic epics, tracing the iconic primordial figures over the long century. In the tradition of classic American studies per Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, Watts places print culture within its specific historical context while also, in the style of Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, John Carlos Rowe, and Amy Kaplan, attending to literary history as a vector of imperial violence.1 Colonizing the Past does not [End Page 491] merely assert that the narratives of “primordial whites” were connected to nation-building: It shows how they were central to it. Watts’s attempt to understand the tangle of racialization, white identity, and settler colonialism in nineteenth-century print culture is a clear, compelling, and original reading of familiar as well as non-canonical texts that “reveals the moral and racial precariousness of the settler nation” (46). While notable recent scholarship has focused on Watts’s broad subject, none has situated the production of ancient pasts in the paradigm of white supremacy and settler triumphalism as clearly and insistently as Watts has here.2 In the connections he draws between marginal texts and canonical writers, Watts also makes clear that the power of primordialism was not confined to the pens of “western” writers or removal apologists. Moreover, Watts’s deep knowledge of the print culture of the early republic and antebellum eras translates into a fascinating and useful guide to U.S. literary history. Watts’s first chapter provides a superb survey of writings on Welsh Indians, by which Watts also displays his unparalleled knowledge of the literary history of early America. Chapter 2 includes a particularly skilled reading of Lydia Sigourney’s 1822 poem Traits of the Aborigines in America and the culture of sentiment, intriguingly casting the New England writer’s anti-removal campaign as motivated not by the abhorrence of violence but rather by millennialism (75, 72). The third chapter is likewise noteworthy for its refreshing reevaluation of the “Mound Builder myth,” [End Page 492] which Watts frames in terms of the rise of industrialism and struggle over western and southern markets. Additionally, his analyses of colonialism and transatlantic folk and nationalist movements provide a thought-provoking reorientation for the immigration debates and anti-Catholic nativism of the mid-nineteenth century. Colonizing the Past is admirable in its forceful assessment of settler triumphalism—Watts boldly indicts, for example, the “genocidal print culture of Jacksonian America”—and for avoiding euphemism or under-statement (94). One of its most compelling, if subtle, arguments is that much of early nineteenth-century literary culture was engaged in developing “fiction[s] of absolution” to excuse white settlers from the theft and murder that enabled U.S. national settlement on Indigenous lands (46, 91, 128). Indeed, the book’s major contribution to the field is its clear-eyed attention to the operations of whiteness, and to the entanglement of racialization and settler colonialism. Moreover, it provides an accessible introduction to settler-colonial theory and delivers a compelling argument for the theory’s applicability to early American literature. The Atlantic orientation of the book, however, is a limitation that frequently led Watts to postcolonial...

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips

Reviewed by: Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips Cathryn Halverson Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips, eds., Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2020. 256 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond is an engaging collection of fourteen essays contributed by scholars at all [End Page 393] stages of their careers. The book grew out of a roundtable at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) inspired by the publication of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Editors Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips explain that rather than simply celebrating Wilder the group wanted to critically analyze her books and influence. Acknowledging that her racial views have made her a controversial writer, they argue for why we should continue to read and study her nonetheless. Grouped into four sections—"Wilder and 'Truth,'" "Wilder and Constructions of Gender," "Wilder, Plains Studies, and the American Literature Canon," and "Cultural and Intercultural Wilder"—the book's many excellent essays complement each other without growing repetitive. Their diverse subjects include, among others, the antimodernist dimension of Wilder-related tourism (Anna Thompson Hajdik), Wilder's and Rose Wilder Lane's differing political views (Dawn Sardella-Ayres), Wilder's perspective on rural women's education (Jericho Williams), and Wilder's use of horses to imagine "Anglo-Indian Womanhood" (Vera R. Foley). Examining Laura's "two terrible mistakes" in respect to both Indians and the "abundant nonhuman world" around her (192), Margaret Noodin's "A Little Place in the Universe: An Ojibwe, Osage, and Dakota View of Laura Ingalls" is a highlight. Full of precisely expressed readings, the book offers many fresh insights: that Little House on the Prairie can be read as a captivity narrative, with Charles Ingalls the terrifying captor (Christine E. Farnan); that Laura's infamous desire to possess a black-eyed Indian baby builds on her attachment to her button-eyed rag doll (Jenna Brack); that the historical record upholds the fictional portrayal of the Wilders' equitable marriage (Melanie J. Fishbane); that Laura's fate in becoming a white mother is to acquire an aversion to Indians (Sonya Sawyer Fritz); that the "ceaseless acts of repetition" generated by the series are the source of its "semblance of truth" (Katharine Slater, 3). One might expect a book on this topic to include several scholars who specialize in western studies or at least make reference to established, influential works in the field. That expectation, [End Page 394] however, is not fulfilled, and as a consequence the collection lacks essays that deliberately situate Wilder within regional literary traditions while engaging with the existing scholarship to theorize her work. Even Annette Kolodny's classic The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers and Amy Kaplan's essential "Manifest Domesticity" are not invoked, nor is Nina Baym's more recent, quantitative Women Writers of the American West. Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House and Frances W. Kaye's "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" are critical touchstones throughout the volume, but a study like Linda Karell's Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature would have provided specific regional insight into the Wilder and Lane partnership that interests so many of these scholars, as would Christine Bold on gender and western cultural production, Susan Rosowski and Brigitte Georgi-Findlay on women's frontier narratives, Krista Comer on landscape, Victoria Lamont on Westerns, and many others that readers of this journal are surely familiar with. While the editors maintain that the relative critical neglect of Wilder is "emblematic of the way critics have historically dismissed many commercially successful women writers" (xv), it is also symptomatic of the widespread tendency to read and write about western women writers in isolation from each other, which in turn reflects the marginalization of western studies at large. Lamont's review essay in Legacy (SSAWW's home journal), "Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century," explores the cluster of factors that have led...

Homes On-the-Road, Terrorized Cabins, and Prophetic Nightmare-scapes: Emma J. Ray's Unsettling Western Fantasies

Homes On-the-Road, Terrorized Cabins, and Prophetic Nightmare-scapesEmma J. Ray's Unsettling Western Fantasies Shelly Jarenski (bio) Despite almost thirty years of scholarship on women's experience in the mythic West of the United States, scholarship that began in many ways with Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her, the frontier myth continues to conjure gendered notions of pioneerism, nonconformity, and adventure. Even when the gendered aspects of this myth are challenged, the American West that most people imagine is still inherently white. In many ways the story of African American women's experience as agents in one of the most palpable fantasies of American belonging has been obscured or erased.1 This erasure has given us an inaccurate sense of both the United States' and African American history. As Eric Gardner's recent work has powerfully documented, this erasure has also given us a truncated definition of African American literary history, one that is limited to the long-form stories of enslaved and ex-enslaved people in rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, as Kolodny argues, it has caused the prevailing fantasy of the United States' frontier to be one of "privatized erotic mastery" rather than one of a "home and familial human community within a cultivated garden" (xiii); and, to extend Kolodny, the dominance of one fantasy over the other has fueled realities of genocide and environmental exploitation. Finally, this erasure has limited our perceptions of who belongs in the nation's narratives, defining who gets to be a "real American" and who does not. However, placing African American women's narratives at the center of our study of American western literature presents a counternarrative to the mythic West by re-centering feminized ideologies of community, care, and cooperation into the pioneer fantasy, [End Page 381] including reimagining these feminized ideologies into environmental relationships. Re-centering African American women's narratives of the West also shifts African American literary history, extending it beyond rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, of course, re-centering African American women's narratives in our study of American western literature allows us to reimagine national belonging. This essay aims to unsettle some of our conceptions of belonging, and of the West, by studying the 1926 memoir of Seattle-based, formerly enslaved evangelical reformer and itinerant preacher Emma J. Ray, titled Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed: Autobiography of Mr. and Mrs. L. P. Ray.2 Although Ray's narrative conforms to masculine aspects of the frontier fantasy at times, more often it breaks with those norms by positing decidedly feminized ideals of resistance and coming of age. For example, Ray and her husband, L. P., find their second freedom—that is, salvation—by conforming to the norms of temperance, service, and grace. Also, Ray transitions from a meek, passive, and placating woman at the beginning of the narrative to an outspoken leader by the end, and she does so through her reliance on Black, often female, communities of piety, such as the Colored Women's Christian Temperance Union and Methodist tent revivals, rather than through any kind of isolationist self-reliance or trials with the landscape. Ray's coming of age in the midst of communities is a reversal of the "solitary Black westerner" stereotype defined by Quintard Taylor as "a solitary figure loosened from moorings of family, home, and community" (qtd. in Johnson 11). Ray's reversal and resituation of this stereotype is crucial for the way we imagine race as well as gender, as Michael Johnson argues that this figure functions imaginatively to "transcen[d] race in part by separating himself from the black (eastern) community to become a member of white (western) society" (11). Ray's coming of age is instead embedded in western, Black, religious communities led by women. In addition to these racialized and feminized modes of resistance, Ray deploys three connected, deeply unsettling themes in her autobiography: mobility, domesticity, and the environmental imaginary. These themes were of crucial importance to those people who were held in bondage's post-emancipation realities, and they have [End Page 382] special resonance for women in the context of the mythic West. These themes are unsettling in Ray...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Marion Rust The Harvard Advocate. Calendar Magazine. Music for the Love of It. Anima. Dirt. Land of Extremes. Sequoia. Editorial work has trailed me from a young age, whether it be helping my father with his self-published newsletter, proofreading undergraduate fiction in college, flying across the country the day after graduation to take on a freebie popular culture monthly in my favorite city, escaping into a series of messy creations put together by the assortment of iconoclasts known as the San Francisco Women Writers Workshop, or long hours as a graduate student propping up an estimable, near-defunct literary journal in the company of my dear friend (now "poetry witch") Annie Finch. As many of you know, I also served as book review editor of this journal (and then coeditor for reviews) for over half a decade. And yet, despite my familiarity with the intricacies of editorial labor in a variety of contexts, as well as the ever-changing contours of our field and even the look of a galley proof, the last few months have upended any sense of expertise I may once have possessed. In appreciation of what those who came before me made look so deceptively easy, I'd like to dedicate the bulk of this introduction to honoring the journal's two most recent prior editors, without whom I would lack both the courage and opportunity to be the person writing this note. One, Professor Sandra Gustafson, edited Early American Literature for a decade and remains close by as its advisory editor. The other, Carolina Distinguished Professor David S. Shields, who preceded Sandra in both these capacities, steps off the masthead altogether with this issue for the first time in twenty-odd years. I'll start with him. No doubt David has entirely forgotten the episode I am about to relate. Years ago, he was kind enough to open an e-mail from a young professor he barely knew. Attached were eight pages of informal ruminations on the distinction between sentimentalism and domesticity in an early American literary context. David wrote back with some thoughts of his own, and that exchange became the germ of my first publication in EAL. The reason [End Page 1] David probably doesn't remember this event is that for him it was entirely unremarkable. But as anyone familiar with standard practice in academic journals knows, his attention was in actual fact decidedly unusual. David's willingness to entertain whatever potentially innovative insight came his way, regardless of who held it or the shape it held, inspired me during a period when institutional walls seemed to loom particularly large. While I can't say I'll exhibit the same generosity of spirit should it come to e-mails with half-done essays attached, I remain grateful to David for valuing conversation over convention. Without sacrificing a shred of this journal's more than half century of high standards, I hope to honor his willingness not to stand on ceremony wherever new ideas are concerned. One of David's best new ideas was appointing Sandra Gustafson to succeed him as editor of the journal. Last year I asked Sandra to reflect on where early American literature, and Early American Literature, found themselves almost a decade into her tenure. Her response, while very different in kind from David's, displays similar intellectual curiosity and personal generosity. If you ask Sandra what she is proudest about regarding her editorship, she almost always speaks first of a commitment to inclusion that extends from special issue topics to historical and theoretical methodologies, to the career stage of its contributors. Many is the graduate student whom Sandra has seen through multiple drafts of a promising article that eventually becomes the pathway to a professorial appointment. These essays sit alongside contributions by Houston Baker, Wai Chi Dimock, Annette Gordon-Reed, Annette Kolodny, Jerome McGann, Peter Onuf, Ivy Schweitzer, Kenneth Warren, and countless other luminaries. Some of Sandra's personal favorite issues include: the most recent, coedited by Rodrigo Lazo and Kirsten Silva-Gruesz, on the Spanish Americas; a joint forum with William and Mary Quarterly on "Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous...

Entering into the Green: Philip Roth and the Pastoral Impulse

This essay, informed by Annette Kolodny's research on the "pastoral impulse," re-examines Philip Roth's subversion of myth in American Pastoral (1997), illuminating the ways Roth exposes and critiques the gendered chasms within America's national narratives. The article connects Roth's novel to John Milton's Paradise Lost as a way of re-considering how the Swede valorizes Dawn as an Eve-like figure of perfection. I focus on how Roth, via Zuckerman, positions Merry and Rita as a hybridized Miltonic serpent who seeks to bring about Seymour and Dawn's fall from the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. By doing so, I argue Roth's problematic representation of women in American Pastoral works to deconstruct the gendered patriarchal narrative that underlies America's "pastoral impulse."

Navigating Rivers and Opening Territories

Navigating Rivers and Opening Territories Susan Imbarrato (bio) Introduction to "The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist: Philadelphia to Natchez, 1783–84" annette kolodnyIn Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives183–200 Edited by william l. andrewsMadison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990 232 pp. For over four decades, Annette Kolodny has been opening up new ways to investigate women's frontier writings. In a discussion of Elizabeth House Trist's journey, for example, Kolodny notes this particularly difficult moment: "Enduring 'excessive cold' and maneuvering treacherous inclines where the horses were 'scarce able to keep their feet' (Trist. Jan. 8, 1784), Trist nonetheless seems to have been eyeing the surrounding countryside with avid curiosity" ( The Land before Her, 39). Rather than conquering her surroundings, Trist is intent on adjusting to and evaluating them. This focusing in on the diary entry and then showing Trist's larger view illustrates Kolodny's technique of carefully integrating voice, setting, and context. This discussion expanded when Kolodny brought "The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist: Philadelphia to Natchez, 1783–84" into publication for the first time in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives. This volume, skillfully edited by William L. Andrews, includes four narratives with scholarly introductions: Sargent Bush, Jr., on Sarah Kemble Knight, Amy Schrager Lang on Mary Rowlandson, Daniel B. Shea on Elizabeth Ashbridge, and Kolodny on Elizabeth House Trist. Journeys in New Worldsis a model of scholarship and editing, with extensive, excellent notes and illustrations. 1 In Annette Kolodny's introduction to Trist's diary, she masterfully integrates historical context with Elizabeth Trist's own observations to draw us into this dramatic narrative. In doing so, she explains the circumstances [End Page 897]surrounding Trist's winter departure and her determination to be reunited with her husband, Nicholas Trist, who had traveled to Natchez to establish a home for Elizabeth and their young son. Regarding the text's larger significance, Kolodny notes, "as the earliest extant diary by a white woman traveling downriver to frontier Natchez, the Trist manuscript offers a unique account of the conditions of frontier life in the years immediately following the Revolution" (188). Along these lines, Kolodny describes Thomas Jefferson's interest in Trist's pending journey, the two having met in Philadelphia where Elizabeth's mother, Mary House, ran a boardinghouse. Kolodny elaborates on the interaction between this friendship and some of Trist's observations: "The description of the coal deposits outside Pittsburgh, for example, was a response both to Jefferson's interest in geography and to his political interest in the potential economic resources of the western territories" (187). These connections bring interesting dimensions to each: Trist as part of a founding westward narrative and Jefferson as an inquisitive friend eager to learn more about the frontier territory. Kolodny's meticulous scholarship is again evident as she recounts her intensive search for the manuscript that was eventually located in the University of Virginia's Alderman Library in a collection separate from both the Trist and Jefferson family papers (introduction 198). This information also proves instructive, for not only are early American women's writings very often cataloged under a husband or father's family papers rather than by a woman's name but a diary may be even more difficult to find. After describing the diary's pages as 6 by 81/2 inches, Kolodny prefaces the manuscript with this note: "The first two pages of the diary are missing; the third page is badly torn along the right margin, and several lines along the bottom are missing" (199; Trist 201). These physical details allow us to visualize the manuscript, if not to imagine its weather-beaten state, which is all too evident in one of the first extant entries dated December 24, 1783, from Lancaster: "Arose very early with an intention to set of [sic] before Breakfast, but it set in to snow very fast which detained us till 10 O' clock." Rising rivers present another hazard, as on January 6, 1784: "My Horse cou'd scarcely keep his feet. He fell with me once, but I was so lucky as to keep my saddle" (Trist...

“Pedagogy”

“Pedagogy” Randi Lynn Tanglen (bio) Paulo Freire’s seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in 1968, just three years after the 1965 establishment of the Western Literature Association. Although Freire’s work wasn’t translated into English until the 1970s, the organization and the field of critical pedagogy both originated when the academy itself was changing in response to student activism in the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, and the American Indian movement. These movements’ intellectual aims were similar to those of Freire’s critical pedagogy: to question systems of domination in order to lead to greater critical consciousness and social change. The field of critical pedagogy assumes that “men and women are essentially unfree and inhabit a world rife with contradictions and asymmetry of power and privilege” and that the resulting inequalities are replicated in institutions of public education and higher learning (McLaren 61). In fact, the Western Literature Association was started in response to how knowledge of the West was brokered, distorted, and manipulated by relations of power, place, and privilege within the academy, particularly the dominant northeastern literary and cultural establishment. A critical pedagogy that emphasizes intersections of theory and practice has been central to the research, teaching, and activism of teachers of western literature as a community of critical educators. While the production of knowledge in the academy and organizations such as the WLA is not free of biases and hierarchies that result in an asymmetry of power and privilege, the educational experience can promote student empowerment and transformation. Western literature teachers join a long line of progressive educators and social activists from the critical pedagogy movement, including [End Page 53] Freire, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks, whose beliefs promote the possibility of education as an emancipatory enterprise. As educators, members of the Western Literature Association in the past and present aim to train students to be aware of the many sides of social inequalities and to become social justice advocates. The organization has emphasized critical pedagogy issues in relation to the West, particularly the historicity and construction of knowledge of and about the West; literature and the environment; race, ethnicity, and indigeneity; and feminist concerns about gender, women, and sexuality. In the classroom, western literature educators posit that academic knowledge of and about the West was created in specific historical moments and traditionally understood in the context of the ideology of manifest destiny and the American Dream. To that end, from its founding and into the present day, the field of western American literary and cultural studies has questioned the dominant myth of the cultural, symbolic, and geographic meaning of the West, both in the teaching and research produced by the field. Early on, the journal Western American Literature published articles such as “West as Myth: Status Report and Call for Action” (1966) by Warren French, which, similar to Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), advanced the study of the West beyond the prevailing clichés and conventional understandings of the region. Annette Kolodny’s 1992 “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers.” took this earlier work even further by dismantling the traditional geographic and linguistic definition of frontier literature. Theoretical developments in “critical regionalism” as applied to the field have given scholars and teachers a method for investigating issues of place, region, culture, and identity in western literary studies (Campbell 2008). Amy T. Hamilton and Tom J. Hillard’s volume Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on Pre-1800 Literature of the American Frontiers (2014) expands the time frame and content of what is considered western American literature and thereby is included in the syllabi of western studies classes in order to transform students’ established understandings of the West and western literature. [End Page 54] Western literary studies also examines how academia reproduces the power relations of society, especially settler-colonialist dynamics that emerge out of the standard historicity of knowledge about the West. Such understandings of the West have resulted in the destruction of the natural environment and landscape of the West, leading some scholar-teachers in the organization to...

Society of Early Americanists Conference 2017: Hyatt Regency Downtown–University of Tulsa Tulsa, March 2–4, 2017

Society of Early Americanists Conference 2017Hyatt Regency Downtown–University of Tulsa Tulsa, March 2–4, 2017 Andrew Newman (bio) I was late in making arrangements. I missed out on the first hotel block, and the second. I ended up booking at the Fairfield Inn, across the tracks from the conference hotel. I finally registered for the conference only the day before, so when I arrived at the registration desk on Thursday afternoon I had to show the receipt on my phone. It was because of the election, of course. Like, I guess, millions of others, since November I had been having trouble thinking about my work, especially my research. My teaching had been reinvigorated actually—I felt more connected to my students—but my writing felt more trivial and self-indulgent than ever. And it had been months since I had touched the arcane project I was coming to Tulsa to present, and I suspected I was about to make a fantastic professional face plant. Only really. interventions I arrived in time for session 4. The panel title that spoke to the problem on my mind was "Early American Studies as Public and Political Interventions." [End Page 298] The paper titles informed me that the panel was not really about the Resistance, but it was impressive nonetheless. Roy Boney, Jr., and Jeff Edwards of the Cherokee Nation Education Services Group dropped some of the biggest names ever heard at an SEA conference—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook—the tech giants they worked with to bring Cherokee syllabary unicode fonts to the major platforms. The next two presenters themselves owned two of the biggest names in our field: Annette Kolodny and David Shields. Kolodny's presentation brought me, personally, to the very inception of my own career, when as a young MA student, newly enrolled in my first course in early American literature, I came upon her essay "Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity" in the New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1993. Now nearly twenty-five years later, I learned that the publication had been preceded by Kolodny's protracted, ultimately successful struggle to get the Times to accept her usage of the term "genocide"—as in the phrase "genocidal campaigns like Jackson's" (27). To that point, the "paper of record" had only applied the term to the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, so by bringing it to bear on the treatment of Native Americans Kolodny had accomplished an important intervention in the semantics of US public history. Kolodny had announced that, because of health concerns, this would be her final appearance at an SEA meeting, and the audience recognized her distinguished career with a stirring standing ovation. Finally, David Shields updated us on his astonishing archives-to-table work as chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. Shields helps track down and reintroduce southern heritage foods like red bearded upland rice, which remained in cultivation only among Merikins, the descendants of African African slaves who were recruited by the British during the War of 1812 and resettled in Trinidad. Shields concluded by exhorting those among us who enjoyed tenure to make the most of our freedom and job security by taking risks, to aim to do more with our careers than to fill up "six inches of shelf space." Actually, I'm not quite sure about the number of inches Shields specified; my memory may be influenced by some conversations I had afterward. Six inches would represent a pretty prolific career. I'm still completing my second inch myself. [End Page 299] creative responses The program had a surprising emphasis on creativity. I attended the second of two roundtables organized by Thomas Hallock on "Responding Creatively to Early American Texts," and I loved it. Heather Kopelson, Harry Brown, Luella D'Amico, and Lisa Logan have developed such exciting ways to add dimensions to their students' engagements with early American literature: respectively, through knitting, nature writing, compiling soundtracks, and composing commonplace books. The samples of student work they presented were brilliant. I was one of the participants in a roundtable organized by Thomas Doran, "Transforming Early American Research into Creative Writing"; I was reading an excerpt from...

Prologue

Prologue Elizabeth R. Wright* We offer heartfelt thanks to Xavier Tubau for his vision and dedication as book review editor from July 2016 to June 2018. He accepted the position with the explicit goal of fomenting interdisciplinary and transatlantic scholarly conversations. In this capacity, Xavier commissioned eighty-three book reviews published in four issues. Each one reflects thoughtful deliberation from the initial assignment to the final editorial evaluation. Having successfully reconceived the Book Review section, Xavier will devote his energies to his own research agenda as well as other service to the profession. But his impact on this journal will long endure. The next two issues of the journal (volume 71, number 1–2) will be the direct result of the extensive international network of reviewers he cultivated. His scholarly engagement and rigor will continue to inspire us. Brown University's Department of Hispanic Studies is the new host of the Book Review, under the auspices of Laura Bass, with editorial assistance from Ana Garriga Espino and Carmen Urbita Ibarreta. In this issue, we inaugurate a new occasional feature—the Bulletin of Practice. This section highlights issues pertinent to the actors, directors, teachers, and musicians rethinking performance traditions for our times. Fittingly, the first edition features an interview Barbara Fuchs conducted with Ignacio García, the new director of the Festival de Teatro Clásico de Almagro. We construed the cover of this issue to spark meditation on a character type who animates the comedia de capa y espada: the dama, as paragon of vivacious urbanity. A sad and unexpected twist of fate as we entered the issue's final phase of production has reoriented the signification of Antes que todo es mi dama—from one of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's ingenious appropriations of proverbial wisdom—to the point of departure for mourning and celebrating our esteemed colleague Amy Williamsen. [End Page 5] Retrato y Semblanza Charles Victor Ganelin Retrato y semblanza de Amy Williamsen Hablan en ello las siguientes personas, en orden de apariencia Charles Victor Ganelin Miami University, Emeritus Autor, autor de comedias Gwyn E. Campbell Washington and Lee University Colega, amiga y cómplice Howard Mancing Purdue University, Emeritus Amigo y colega Catherine Larson Indiana University, Emerita Colega y amiga James Parr University of California, Riverside, Emeritus Director de tesis, colega y amigo Annette Kolodny University of Arizona, Emerita Decana y amiga Susan Fischer Bucknell University, Emerita Colega y amiga I first met Amy at an MLA (of course!) sitting next to her father Vern Williamsen (¡no faltaba más!) in the hotel bar (¡desde luego!). The year was 1984, and Amy was about to defend her dissertation and begin her rapid rise through the academic ranks. The work that would come to define her career on Cervantes, women writers, and the comedia, through a variety of theoretical lenses, has influenced scholars across generations. What will ever remain with us are her cheerfulness, her eagerness, and the surprising depth of knowledge she brought even early in her career. Although I can't recall the actual conversations of our first meeting, the tenor of critical thought leavened by joviality and jocularity—the sense of her wit, humor, and joy—remains firmly embedded in my memory, along with her keen intellect and effusive, kind smile. So how to describe a life lived to its fullest, particularly when that life is snatched away from her—and from all who knew her—in a cruel and unsuspecting way, although she was doing what she loved, swimming in the ocean? I wish not to dwell on the sadness of Amy's death but on her sharp, incisive mind and her vivacious, abundant, overflowing, and generous soul that touched the lives and careers of countless scholars who became her friends in short order. Gwyn E. Campbell remembers reading an early essay of Amy's as a newly appointed assistant professor, finding the courage to contact her out of the blue with questions, and receiving a reply written as if it had come from an old friend. Others have shared similar stories of Amy's generosity. Amy grew up in Columbia, Missouri, where Vern served on the faculty of the University...

No "Rural Bowl of Milk": Demographic Agrarianism and Unsustainability in Pierre

No "Rural Bowl of Milk":Demographic Agrarianism and Unsustainability in Pierre Abby L. Goode (bio) In the summer of 1850, Herman Melville volunteered to ghost-write an agricultural report that would turn heads. A favor to his less-educated cousin Robert, chair of the Agricultural Committee in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Melville's little-known report is an experimental georgic, a pastiche of early American farm writing. Echoing the mythic, utopian vision of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), he lauds Berkshire farmers' "efforts to…increase the quantity of…food which nourished our great progenitors in the Garden of Eden."1 He celebrates the county's fertility, its "various kinds of fruit," and its "numerous, extensive and well cultivated fields of Corn," portraying an "exuberant" landscape rich in foodstuffs, ever-improving with the labor of farmer-citizens.2 Drawing on agrarian ideals of small farming and democratic citizenship, Melville imagines a timeless, unadulterated utopia in the heart of New England. Melville's agricultural report displays a lineage between American agrarianism and the notion of sustainability. It mingles idyllic, rural imagery with emerging concerns about "exhaustion of the soil" and "drain[s] upon the land."3 Descriptions of the landscape's beauty and productivity appear alongside endorsements of composting and soil enrichment—of "saving every ingredient…which renovates exhausted lands, and returns to the earth those particles which have been drawn from it…enabling nature to reinvest herself."4 Envisioning a renewal of agricultural resources, Melville's report presents sustainability, well before the term officially appears, in a Crèvecoeurian context of utopian agrarianism. In so doing, it calls attention to an unexamined American literary genealogy of sustainability. Scholars currently understand sustainability as a global and contemporary [End Page 27] concept, officially defined in the UN's 1987 Brundtland Report as development that "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."5 Yet as Melville's report suggests, sustainability emerges in part from the mythic ideal of agrarian utopia: a New World fantasy of demographic growth and agricultural abundance rooted in Jeffersonian agrarian principles of democratic farming and land-owning. Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and Annette Kolodny have analyzed versions of this ideal in American literary history, using phrases such as "the Garden of the World," "virgin continent" and "provider of sustenance."6 Imagining a utopia of renewable resources that "meet[] the needs" of present and future generations, Melville's report gestures towards the integral role of this agrarian ideal and, more broadly, American literature in the development of sustainability discourses—a possible explanation for why the UN Brundtland Report reads as so oddly Jeffersonian.7 While Melville's report promotes agrarian principles and farming practices that we today associate with sustainability, his novel Pierre (1852), published the following year, inverts this agrarian ideal, depicting an unsustainable population through images of racial and sexual degeneracy.8 In an 1852 letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Melville described his then-forthcoming novel with a fitting agricultural metaphor: "The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk."9 But rather than directly capture this small farming scene, Pierre portrays its very opposites, the two realms that Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson condemn as wasteful and unproductive: an aristocratic estate and a densely-packed city, both of which are home to a dwindling and largely starving population, with no "rural bowl of milk" to sustain it. This inversion uncovers the racial and reproductive connotations of agrarian rhetoric more broadly. In the novel, the estate's diminishing agricultural fertility and the city's overpopulation emerge through interrelated images of racial mottling, sexual excess, and sterility. Portraying demographic and agricultural decline, Pierre articulates an unexamined reproductive subtext of the agrarian ideal: the idea that sexual disorder and racial intermingling enfeeble the fertility, vigor, and agricultural productivity of the American population. Set in New York City and the Hudson Valley in the 1840s, Pierre dramatizes the fears of mid-century advocates of agrarianism—land reformers, labor radicals, and nativists who promoted the agrarian ideal as an alternative to what they saw as an increasingly unsustainable society...

“A Reading Problem”: Margaret Lynn, Jean Stafford, and Literary Criticism of the American West

“A Reading Problem”:Margaret Lynn, Jean Stafford, and Literary Criticism of the American West Cathryn Halverson I have borrowed the main title of this essay from one of Jean Stafford’s many autobiographical short stories, “A Reading Problem.” Recasting details of Stafford’s Boulder, Colorado girlhood, the story tracks the quest of its protagonist, Emily Vanderpool, to read in peace. Emily owns many books, including Tom Sawyer Abroad, Hans Brinker, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but she has no place to read them free from the scrutiny of prying adults. A hotel lobby and the town jail prove to be only temporary solutions, and her dilemma leads to a fraught encounter with a con man and his daughter. The story ends with Emily’s revelation that the cemetery meets her needs. However, the rather portentous final image of her reading while seated “beside the grave of an infant kinswoman of the sheriff, a late-nineteenth-century baby called Primrose Starbird,” undermines any complacent resolution (344). Emily’s proximity to another bygone Colorado girl points at once toward familial connections between generations of western women and the inaccessibility of past stories. The evocative name on the stone is the only text the “infant kinswoman” offers her. This essay uncovers connections between western women writers by discussing Jean Stafford in concert with her literal kinswoman, Margaret Lynn. Author of the once widely known A Stepdaughter of the Prairie, Lynn was a native Missourian who preceded Stafford as an important spokeswoman of the West; she was also, not incidentally, Stafford’s first cousin once removed. The brunt of my argument is that Stafford and Lynn thematize, in their autobiographical texts, the difficulty of identifying a literary tradition shaped by western women. As critics, I posit, we experience this same difficulty—the same “reading problem” in respect to women writers and the West. Stafford’s three novels and many short stories established her as a leading [End Page 127] literary voice of the American West and “a figure of genuine consequence” in American letters more generally (Yardley). For over twenty years Stafford published short fiction in the New Yorker, a magazine with which she remains closely associated, and she won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Collected Stories. Her oeuvre includes numerous expressions of the plight of the female intellectual coming of age in the American West—some comic, like “A Reading Problem,” and others tragic, like her best-known book, The Mountain Lion (1947). Stafford was deeply interested in the ramifications of being a western woman. She did not, however, openly explore relationships between women in the West. Women’s succor and bonds are present in her fiction only at a sedimentary level, as almost literally configured in the image of Emily Vanderpool reading beside Primrose Starbird’s grave. Stafford’s inclination to feature “woman” over “women”—to focus, that is, on individual female characters without making larger claims about women’s experience—is mirrored in dominant trends in western literary criticism. Key figures like Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Mourning Dove, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, to take some earlier twentieth-century examples, are typically treated in single-author studies. Correlatively, we have only a scant handful of monographs on “western women’s literature” as such. It is telling that Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her, published over three decades ago, remains the standard reference. In her review essay, “Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century,” Victoria Lamont investigates the sources of this dearth. Her title references Christine Bold’s observation about the lack of major studies featuring “the explanatory patterns and causal narratives that would produce an alternative history of the literary West” (qtd. in Lamont 322). Lamont shows that the limited number of monographs is due partly to the long stretch of recovery work that had to come first, in a discipline that “emerged from the margins of a marginal field” (311). Yet the scarcity is now perpetuated by its achieved sophistication, with scholars favoring—over broad claims—the more focused arguments that case studies yield. “The increasing complexity of feminist work may have had the unintended consequence of allowing traditional master narratives to...

In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny (review)

In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny (review)

“This Long Looked For Event”: Retrieving Early Contact History from Penobscot Oral Traditions

“This Long Looked For Event”:Retrieving Early Contact History from Penobscot Oral Traditions Annette Kolodny (bio) WHEN JOSEPH NICOLAR TOOK UP THE TASK of telling the story of his people from the first moments of the creation of the world by the Great Spirit through the several arrivals and eventual permanent settlement of the white man in “the red man’s world,” he made clear at the outset that his was no act of colonial mimicry (2007, 95). First published in 1893, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man neither replicated nor followed the history Nicolar had been taught in the white man’s schools (95).1 As he emphatically declared in the first sentence of his preface, “there have been no historical works of the white man, nor any other written history from any source quoted” (95). In Nicolar’s experience, even after more than two centuries of contact and colonialism, the world of the red man remained for the white man “as hidden things” (95). Therefore, “all prophecies, theories and ideas of the educated and intelligent of all races have been laid aside,” Nicolar explained. The authority for his work rested in “the traditions as I have gathered them from my people” after “forty years of search and study” (95, 96). As a descendant of “that once numerous and most powerful race, … my life having been spent in the researches of my people’s past life,” Nicolar saw himself as ensuring that the story of the red man would not “pass away unwritten” (95). But how shall we understand his rendering of his “people’s past life”? Is there any sense in which that “past life,” so obviously anchored in Penobscot oral storytelling practices, can also be read as history? Or, to put it another way, does Nicolar’s retelling of Penobscot traditions offer us any new understanding of the long and complex realities of the Penobscot past? And, more specifically, can these Penobscot oral traditions contribute to a history of early Native and European contacts that is at once more accurate and also more ethical than the mythology of a Columbian “first discovery” still so prevalent in too many of our schools and schoolbooks? In a thoughtful and probing essay on “merging European and Native views of early contact,” published in 2001, Canadian anthropologist Toby Morantz posed similar questions: “Can there be a single history that reflects both perspectives? The one draws on a rich, ancient oral tradition, and the other on [End Page 90] an equally rich, relatively ancient recorded one, but each is embedded in radically different cultural contexts” (49). After examining both Innu/Cree and Euro-Canadian materials, Morantz finally concluded “that it is impossible” (64). This essay challenges that conclusion. By focusing on both Native and European narratives about early encounters along the coast of Maine, I hope to gesture toward a new kind of history that honors what I call the experiential knowledge embedded in Indigenous traditions. This leads inevitably to the decoupling of the concepts of “contact” and “discovery” as one and the same thing. And this approach also effectively deconstructs the by-now oversimplified construction of “contact” as always and everywhere a first contact, that is, an event singular and unprecedented. Finally, I will point to the experiential knowledge embedded in Indigenous oral historiography as additional evidence that the fifteenth-century Doctrine of Discovery, as applied in the Americas, was often no more than a fiction dressed in legal costume. Lands Where No “Christian Had Been Before” In 1605, at the behest of a group of Catholic investors in England, Captain George Waymouth explored the islands and coastal waterways of Maine in search of a suitable location to plant a new colony. On board Waymouth’s ship was James Rosier, a Catholic priest who recorded a dated running narrative of their journey which was published that same year in London under the title A True Relation. According to Rosier, as they explored the Penobscot Bay area, Waymouth’s company “diligently observed, that in no place, about either the Islands, or up in the Maine, or alongst the river, we could not discerne any token or signe, that ever any...

“How can Life be still?”: Teaching Janet Frame’s <em>A State of Siege</em> and Virginia Woolf’s <em>To the Lighthouse</em>

Janet Frame's A State of Siege was published in 1966. In both style and theme, the novel was ahead of its time. Its style remains a challenge to today's students, and the feminist overtones of Frame's tale, dealing as it does with a middle-aged woman-Malfred Signal-breaking free of family and job to pursue her art, might at first glance seem dated to a generation in which have seemingly made such gains in opportunities in education and career. Yet so often remain primary caretakers when family members need help, like Malfred, and so many careers, like the teaching job from which Malfred retires in A State of Siege, remain female-identified. mysterious way in which Malfred dies allows speculation as to what finally defeats her. novel, rooted in so many realistic details, at the same time contains allegorical elements that allow students to speculate about the persistence of expectations for dictated by gender, as well as reasons for violence against women. novel would work in many classes from Women in Literature, to the Female Gothic, Zealand Literature, and Modernism (or the Lyrical Novel). Even paired with such novels as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Frame's novel holds its own. Because of limitations of space, will concentrate on a comparison between A State of Siege and To the Lighthouse, though will mention other works, including films, to provide resources that may prove helpful in teaching a range of classes.There are many similarities between Woolf's novel and Frame's. Each novel features a middle-aged female painter who is looked down upon by other characters, and each novel can be viewed as a tribute to the author's mother-until she wrote To the Lighthouse Woolf said her mother's memory obsessed her (Sketch 80); Frame's mother died before she wrote her novel, but her mentor Frank Sargeson forbade her to speak of the death, according to biographer Michael King (135-36). Each novel employs stylistic experimentation and is divided into three parts. In A State of Siege the parts are The Knocking, Darkness, and The Stone. In To the Lighthouse the parts are The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. In Woolf's novel, World War intervenes in the action and scars the characters; in Frame's, it is World War II that alters Malfred's life. Ironically, in some ways the earlier novel, To the Lighthouse, could be seen as presenting the most successfully liberated female artist in that Lily Briscoe finishes her painting at the end of the novel, declaring, I have had my vision (310), whereas the deadly assault on Malfred Signal begins the night of the day she finishes her painting, and her painting is not even of her sought-after New View. Both Woolf and Frame were also institutionalized numerous times in their lives. Frame may never have suffered from any mental illness beyond anxiety and depression (though she received both insulin shock treatments and electroshock). Woolf was diagnosed as schizophrenic, but Frame was found by one doctor not to be suffering schizophrenia at all (King 197). More than once, Frame's linguistic flights of fancy were misinterpreted as madness for which she was institutionalized and treated.In fact, part of the difficulty of both A State of Siege and To the Lighthouse comes from the fact that both novels are stylistic tours de force that show that relate to in a different way than men do. As Annette Kolodny points out, women writers, coming into a tradition of literary and conventional forms already appropriated, for centuries, to the purposes of male expression, will be forced virtually to 'wrestle' with that language (6) in order 'to remake it as a adequate to our conceptual processes' (Stanley and Robbins, qtd. in Kolodny 6). By the end of Frame's work, a piece of nonsense verse has pride of place, demonstrating the break from based on the Name of the Father, as Jacques Lacan would say. …

The Viking Ball Game

Knattleikr, literally ball is mentioned several times in Icelandic sagas, but references are generally brief and provide few details of how game was played. During last years of nineteenth century and first half of twentieth century, there was a great deal of interest in knattleikr. This resulted in several articles on game, including those by Ebbe Hertzberg (1904) and Bjorn Bjarnason (1905, 1950). (1) Hertzberg suggested that knattleikr was related to lacrosse, an idea that has recently been brought to attention of sports enthusiasts by George Fosty's 2010 article, Is Lacrosse Proof Norse Reached Great Lakes? Bjorn Bjarnason's book (1950), which includes his view of game, has become standard work on sports and games played by Norse. (2) Hertzberg wrote at a time in history of lacrosse when Europeans may have been attracted to idea that they were original owners of that game. Although there is no strong evidence for a historical connection between two games, recent research into lacrosse as it was played by Native Americans, provides that help clarify some of passages depicting knattleikr games in Icelandic sagas. The resulting description of game is slightly closer to Bjorn Bjarnason's than to Hertzberg's. The impression one gets of knattleikr from descriptions in sagas, particularly Egils saga, Gisla saga, Grettis saga, and Eyrbyggja saga, is that it was violent and individualistic. Playing scenes focus on two to four players, and it is not unusual for someone to get hurt. John D. Martin accepts that these descriptions reflect real rules of play, arguing that the saga compilers were writing as close to life as they (Martin 2003, 26). A brief knattleikr episode in Islendmjja saga, thought to narrate contemporary events, suggests that descriptions in sagas represent play in Middle Ages, when sagas that include it were written down. Whether, and, if so, how, game was played between c. 930 and c. 1030, period depicted in most of sagas that include knattleikr, is difficult to answer. Taken at face value, sagas imply that game was played during this period, but another source of evidence is needed for verification because these episodes could have been used for reasons other than historical accuracy, such as creation of literary tension. Martin goes on to compare roles of sports and games in sagas to roles of Native American games and finds striking parallels between two cultures (2003, 42). This comparison reflects Hertzberg's earlier suggestion that lacrosse had its origin in knattleikr. According to Hertzberg, early Norse visitors taught game to people they came into contact with in Vinland, and those people continued to play it long after Norse had left (1904, 210-20). This idea had an impact on Norse studies at time. Fridtjof Nansen writes: If Hertzberg is right in his supposition that Indians may have got this game from Norsemen, this would lend strong support to view that latter had considerable intercourse with America and its natives (1911, 38). Hertzberg's idea is a product of his time. In early twentieth century, Europeans were in process of formalizing rules of lacrosse and making game their own. Attributing game's origin to Norse explorers allowed them a kind of justification for taking game from Native Americans. This fits in well with recent work of Annette Kolodny (2012), which examines importance of idea that Norse were first Europeans in North America in nineteenth century. Specifically, Kolodny describes how popularity of Vinland sagas and interest in Norse discovery of North America influenced people in northeastern United States during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her view, idea that Norse had arrived in North America centuries earlier than Columbus allowed European settlers to justify American Indian removals of time. …

The Invention of Viking America

The Invention of Viking AmericaThis essay is an extended review of Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). The 448-page paperback includes ten illustrations and is priced at $27.95.IN SEARCH OF FIRST CONTACT: THE VIKINGS OF VINLAND, THE PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ANXIETY OF DISCOVERY. By Annette Kolodny. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xiv + 448 pp. $27.95, paperback.Since the publication of her seminal books and articles in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Annette Kolodny has been a true pioneer in literary historiography. Indeed, if the field of Literature as understood today has come to include multiple approaches and perspectives- including multicultural, multilingual, trans- and circum-Atlantic, as well as hemispheric perspectives-thereby utterly transforming what we mean by both American and Literature, it is in great part owing to Kolodny's tireless efforts in opening up new archives beyond the New Critical canons to include texts written in English as well as other languages by white men as well as nonwhite men and women, many of whom originated from outside the traditional Anglo-American elites. Her most recent book, In Search of First Contact, continues her quest to transform literary and to open up new archives by considering the literary record of the contact between the Americas and Europe in the eleventh century resulting from the voyages of Leif Eiriksson and other Norsemen, in particular the so-called Vinland Sagas first preserved among the Norse as oral traditions and then written down in the fourteenth century, as well as various Native artifacts and oral traditions possibly bearing testimony to this first contact. In addition, the book considers the cultural of the idea of a contact resulting from the Norse in Anglo-American letters from colonial times to the twentieth century. On the one hand, then, Kolodny writes, [T]his book is overwhelmingly about stories: about who told them, when, and where (10). On the other hand, however, it also means to take full advantage of much recent scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and history (10) in order to raise new historical questions about the nature and location of the Vinland colony, as well as about the Native Vinlanders (called Skraelings in the Sagas). The result is a book that impresses in the innovativeness of its thoroughly inter- or multi-disciplinary methodology, drawing as it does on a number of literary and nonliterary archives.As the author is doubtlessly aware, the of the notion of a contact or discovery predating Christopher Columbus's voyages reaches back in Europe to Columbus's own time, when such Spanish imperial historians as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, writing on behalf of the Spanish crown in the context of its legal fight against the Columbus family, spread tales about some anonymous pilot who had supposedly imparted the secret knowledge of the existence of a fourth to Columbus before the latter embarked on his first transatlantic voyage. The implications of this tale, if true, were clear: the rights and privileges that the crown had previously bestowed on Columbus and his descendants in the Capitulations of Santa Fe in April of 1492 regarding any lands and islands he might on his Westerly way to Asia were null and void, since he would not have been the first to discover those lands. During the seventeenth century, English imperialists such as Samuel Purchas added their own versions to the old story of a prediscovery by arguing that the so-called Rights of Discovery of the North continent belonged to England because of John Cabot's voyages on behalf of the English crown, rather than to Spain or Portugal (given that Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci had only touched the Caribbean islands and South America), and that, in any case, America had already been discovered by some medieval Welsh prince named Madoc in 1170. …