Early American Literary Studies Research Articles

Remaking Early American Literary Studies (Again)

Abstract This review essay considers the edited collection American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1770-1828, in relation to current shifts in the field of early American literary studies away from New Historicist methodologies toward a concern with topics such as form, genre, and networks. Seeking to interrogate longstanding critical assumptions about the danger of “grand narratives” and “bounded wholes,” it asks whether potentially progressive alternatives to concepts of transition and contingency are possible. At a moment when early Americanist scholarship, and the institutional and political contexts for it, are in a heightened state of flux, what emerging lines of inquiry are likely to have an ongoing influence and to what degree are critics working on the long eighteenth century engaged in a shared project?

:Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures

:<i>Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures</i>

Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis

Reviewed by: Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis Aimee Armande Wilson Gender in American Literature and Culture. Edited by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. v + 375 pp. $39.99 cloth/$32.00 e-book. Gender in American Literature and Culture seeks to build on previous generations of feminist and gender studies scholarship. The chapters "honor the tradition of feminist recovery projects," "follow in the wake of previous critics who have redefined some of the texts that are considered canonical," and challenge "the well-entrenched white patriarchy that has often narrowly defined what counts as literary" (3). These may be familiar goals, but they are nevertheless important ones. The outcomes that the earliest feminist literary critics set out to achieve are still as worthy as they are unattained. This is not to suggest that no progress has been made but to recognize that much work remains. As editors Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis point out, "decades of canon-busting have barely nudged white male authors from their primacy of place" (3). Current issues get top billing in Gender in American Literature and Culture; a small sampling includes #MeToo and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements, settler colonialism, transphobia, and attacks on reproductive rights. The book's scope is admirably diverse, citing "texts by forty-three white authors and forty-six writers of color, written as early as 1630 and as recently as 2018" (3). Many of these authors are well known, such as Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book covers just as many lesser-known authors, too, including Gerda Saunders, author of a contemporary Alzheimer's memoir, and 'Afīfa Karam, an early-twentieth-century Lebanese-American journalist, novelist, and translator. As with any volume covering such a large swath of authors, topics, and time periods, comprehensiveness is impossible. The editors admit that they are not attempting comprehensiveness and, furthermore, confront the intellectual flaws of such grand-sweep styles of literary scholarship. In one of the most insightful moments in the introduction, Lutes and Travis establish the scope of the book while simultaneously commenting on the state of literary studies in 2021: "While we believe that understanding the cultural and historical operations of gender in the United States is more pressing than ever, we also recognize that a chastened model of literary criticism has emerged, one that is less confident in its transformative potential, more skeptical of liberatory claims, and more modest in its sense of what it can accomplish" (2). Although the volume was completed before the global pandemic and its continuing fallout, the inequities laid bare by these events were evident long before, and the writers in this volume respond to those extant [End Page 125] inequities. If anything, the pandemic years have made this book timelier and more urgent. As would be expected given this feminist approach, the volume does not shy away from political issues. Indeed, the feminist underpinnings of the volume can be seen in the editors' open embrace of presentism. Lutes and Travis state that the book "responds to this cultural and political moment with chapters that are presentist and activist but also keen to avoid overreaching" (2). At its best, the presentism employed by the writers in this volume simultaneously considers differences between historical periods as well as bridges between them in service of a better understanding of the conditions that led to current tragedies and political flashpoints. Each of the book's three thematic sections is organized chronologically. In the first, "Intimacies," writers consider literary depictions of intimate relationships. Chapters focus on the various forms of desire and violence contained in these relationships. Standouts include Marion Rust's "Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel," which is part of a resurgence of scholarly interest in sexuality in early American literary studies, and Travis M. Foster's "The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America," which considers the intersection of masculinity, eugenics, and white supremacy in the popular press. "Aggressions," the second section, "demonstrate[s] that gendered violence is endemic to American literary history and culture" (8). This section is the strongest of the...

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Editor's Note

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

Translation, Counterrevolution, and the Early American Novel: Richard Alsop's The Lovers of La Vendée, or Revolutionary Tyranny

This essay examines The Lovers of La Vendée (1808), the Connecticut Wit Richard Alsop's translation of the French author Étienne Gosse's 1799 novel Les amans vendéens. The interventions that Alsop made in order to conform the text to his own values reflect the ongoing significance of revolutionary France in US political and literary discourse in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Drawing on insights from translation studies, I argue that this text troubles the boundary between original and copy and further expands the category of American literature—and, moreover, that the traditional exclusion of translations from the field of early American literary studies has played a role in shaping received notions about the relationship between democracy and American literature.

Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association

Reviewed by: Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association Ana Schwartz (bio) Annual Meeting of the Modern Language AssociationChicago, 01 3–6, 2019 Two years ago, at one of three panels sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Philadelphia—the panel that anticipated American [End Page 879] Literature'srecent "Post Exceptionalist Puritans" special issue—a senior scholar asked the three participants to reflect on how our field might ensure that early American texts remain relevant to our students, the scholars and researchers of the future. At its most basic, the question expressed a desire to engage productively with fellow early Americanists, particularly the relatively junior panel participants, regarding the question of relevance. Most everyone in the room seemed to believe that at least some of the value of studying early America is the opportunity to reveal continuities between the social and political contestations preserved in the texts of the past and the social and political contestations taking place in the present. Yet a meaningful and somewhat dissonant concern remains latent in the original question, a concern that expresses itself in the question's implicitly jeremiad tone. That is, in addition to expressing an avowed commitment to future generations of young scholars, the question seems also to express an anxiety—an anxiety unusually dynamic within early American texts themselves—regarding the possible loss of certain priorities and presumptions that earlier generations of scholars understood as foundational, so much so that the field seems unimaginable without them. 1 Put otherwise, for many students, both formal and informal, both within and beyond our classrooms, early American themes such as the legal and scientific institutionalization of race as an instrument of domination, the systematic undermining of sovereignty and self-determination beyond the borders of the nation-state, and the dispossession from ancestral territories are and have long been intimately relevant concerns. Though the study of these topics and the recognition of this infelicitous relevance is not unique to junior researchers, 2the task of articulating this relevance and, perhaps, making these themes lessoppressively relevant has in recent years precipitated a turn in larger numbers from newer members of early American literary studies to archives and methods from beyond the received boundaries of the field, an expansiveness that, given the material structures of the academic institutions within which our scholarship takes place, might feel threatening to the security of the discipline. Researchers from beyond the field of early American studies, as the 2019 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association made evident, have drawn richly from early American texts and contexts, and are, in turn, offering methods and approaches that might dynamically answer the troubling appearance of a gap between our students' interests and our canonical objects. [End Page 880] The Society of Early Americanists sponsored four panels at the 2019 MLA meeting. Two took place back-to-back on the first day; two back-to-back on the third. At the first panel, "Disavowed Roots," organized by Jordan Stein, R. J. Boutelle, Jared Hickman, and Jerome McGann shared new work that variously approached the task of extricating early Americanist scholarship from the racist premises on which it was inaugurated. Boutelle discussed immanent critiques of the nation's founding documents authored by participants in the early Colored Conventions in the nineteenth century; Hickman reassessed the endorsement of American exceptionalism conventionally attributed to that phrase's coiner, Louis Hartz, in texts like The Liberal Tradition; and McGann outlined the distorting remediations produced by conventional literary-historical approaches to texts like Indian treaties, which, he observed, were experienced differently between participating parties. Such distorting remediation was one of the shared preoccupations of the second society-sponsored panel, Steffi Dippold and Lauren Coats's "Beyond Recovery," anticipating the forthcoming Early American Literaturespecial issue of the same name. Tacitly engaging recent work in adjacent fields, six panelists lingered over various overlapping questions about the ethics of engaging with compromised archives, questions already being taken up beyond our field. 3The breadth of these object lessons was impressive. John Pollack began with identifying the first—and frustratingly indecipherable—Indigenous American words recorded in European texts...

Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example ed. by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

Reviewed by: Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example ed. by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse Matthew Pethers (bio) Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example nancy armstrong and leonard tennenhouse Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017 264 pp. Writing both separately and together Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have, over the last thirty years, consistently shaped the direction of early American literary studies. Their latest collaboration, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, promises to maintain this field-defining track record, thanks to the richly conceptualized and fluently argued case it makes for literary formalism and network theory as (re)emerging critical approaches that can provide innovative perspectives on the fiction of the early Republic. Here Armstrong and Tennenhouse set out to displace Benedict Anderson's seminal paradigm of the "imagined community," and its conflation of the novel form with a unified sense of national identity, by suggesting that the loosely structured plots and endlessly mobile protagonists typical of the early American novel can best be read as the expression of a young nation that was politically decentralized and geographically dislocated rather than homogenously centripetal. Consequently, this book contends, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century American novelists differed radically from their British contemporaries, who managed to securely ground their protagonists within the safe confines of ordered households, inherited land, and familiar communities. Aesthetically and ideologically unable to transplant these thematic motifs to the New World, in Armstrong and Tennenhouse's view, figures like Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, and Leonora San-say [End Page 271] instead developed their own fictional vocabulary. Thus, the central aim of Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing is to show how, in the work of these writers and many others, "a sequence of particular tropes mobilized a social network that replaced the traditional concept of property as the traditional means for a novel to organize its field of characters" (15). In tracing how this argument is prosecuted Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing can essentially be divided into three parts. The first three chapters lay out the critical and historical parameters for understanding the distinctive formal patterns adopted by America's first novelists. Accordingly, chapter 1 considers the question of "style"—and urges us to approach it as a mode of representing social relations rather than a marker of authorial flair—through a comparison between the opposingly fluid and introspective communities portrayed in the writings of Brockden Brown and Jane Austen. In this respect, if we accept that "style consists of formal rules that writers must observe in order to engage prospective readers in a community that forms according to those rules," then the picaresque wandering in Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) "affords glimpses of the affirmative potential in having no fixed identity, as well as the advantages of a government always in the process of reformulating itself" (19, 33). The question of how the newly born United States came to have such a dynamically adjustable political system becomes the subject of chapter 2, which deals with the transformations that the European model of the social contract underwent during the American Revolution and the solutions that the Founding Fathers developed for harmonizing a polity increasingly understood to be dominated by "men of interests" rather than "men of property," while the relationship of the early American novel's untidy formal qualities to traditional theories of the novel is discussed in chapter 3, which utilizes Jacques Rancière's distinction between "democratic writing" (a style that addresses everyone equally) and "literature" (a style that privileges the author's voice) in order to make an effective case for rescuing the early American novel from its marginal place in a canon oriented around Forsterian notions of literary cohesion. Following this important and invariably thought-provoking groundwork, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing then spends its next five chapters delineating the five particular "formal moves, or tropes" that Armstrong and Tennenhouse see as distinguishing early republican fiction from that being written across the Atlantic (11). Here, in a series of wide-ranging [End Page 272] case studies, we get what are easily among the most sophisticated and thorough of...

The 2016 Richard Beale Davis Prize

The 2016 Richard Beale Davis Prize Monique Allewaert, Duncan Faherty, and Jordan Alexander Stein It is with sincere pleasure that the prize committee awards the 2016 Richard Beale Davis Prize to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, for her essay "Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World." This essay considers the nature of aesthetic judgment, and finds in this familiar eighteenth-century subject a wholly new and startlingly fresh theory of the cultural processes and imperial contexts in which such judgment develops. Grounding its notion of the aesthetic in aesthesis—in sensory cultivation and embodied experience—Dillon's essay advances the claim that "the aesthetic is never wholly distinct from aesthesis—from the process by which sensation becomes a site of shared meaning and, conversely, the process by which sensation shears away from the constraints of collective sense into materiality as well." Displaying substantial learning and great originality, this essay successfully shows how European colonial domination by way of Enlightenment technology can be rewritten from below. Following the decades-long turn in our field away from aesthetic evaluations of literary texts and toward historicist and culturalist questions, "Atlantic Aesthesis" considers a historicist and culturalist understanding of the aesthetic itself, demonstrating with admirable reflexivity how our contemporary critical categories came to seem opposed to one another in the first place. Dillon's essay looks across a range of European examples—including diaries and contact narratives by Thomas Morris, John Smith, Thomas Hariot, and Gabriel Sagard—to show how Native and, to a lesser extent, African people engaged materially and sensually with printed books, while European chroniclers cast aspersions on these forms of engagement. Yet her essay further elaborates the complexity and sophistication behind many of these non-European engagements with texts, so that when the essay turns in its final section to a consideration of wampum, Dillon is able to demonstrate how this communicative medium (despite being non-alphabetic and, by that standard, nonreferential) exemplifies a form of aesthesis evident in European engagements with texts as well. [End Page 1] Though "Atlantic Aesthesis" appeared alongside many other excellent essays, it distinguished itself in a number of salutary ways. One was its sheer theoretical firepower. Moving fluently between discussions of Kantian judgment, Frankfurt school Marxism, and actor-network theory, the essay distills complex ideas in a synthetic, intelligent, and persuasive manner. But Dillon's essay does not rely on a canon of European critical theory, and indeed one of its other great strengths is its success in digging deep into indigenous theories of text, textuality, and sensory response, and positioning these in relation to European accounts of the aesthetic. Moreover, when the essay turns to its historical materials, it reads familiar colonial texts anew, showing how seemingly minor details such as the inventory of gifts exchanged between imperial and indigenous actors becomes central to the much larger story of how scholars have come to think about what texts are and how they should be read. Furthering the essay's intellectual strengths is the able and clear writing that makes its argument a pleasure to follow from introduction to endnote. Creative in its conception and robust in its synthesis, "Atlantic Aesthesis" indicates the potential of early American literary studies as field where interdisciplinarity means a deep and serious engagement with multiple aspects of the past, and thoughtful consideration of how the past comes to bear on the historical present. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2018 The University of North Carolina Press

Early American Disability Studies

Early American Disability Studies Sari Altschuler (bio) and Cristobal Silva (bio) If a scholar of the early Americas wanted to learn more about the understudied topic of disability in the period, she might head to her desk, open her computer, and keyword search disability or disabled in a digital database like Early American Imprints, Early English Books Online, or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Sure enough, she would find over twenty thousand combined citations, a great number of which point to legal and religious documents that use disability as a metaphor to describe individuals alienated from God or who had somehow lost their legal rights. While she would find documents that refer explicitly to physical or cognitive impairment, those citations would neither be as numerous nor as familiar as she might hope, given how many hits her initial searches produced.1 For a sense of the multiple registers in which disability circulated at the end of the eighteenth century—often in the same document—she could turn to Article 2, Section 1 (clause 6), of the US Constitution, which describes the removal of a president from office: In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.2 Here she would note the way that “inability” to perform the duties of the office—figured alongside death and resignation at the beginning of the clause—slides seamlessly into “disability” by the end. In this context, “disability” suggests a temporary condition impeding the performance of the office’s constitutionally defined functions, but the clause does not specify that this impairment is physical or cognitive. Anecdotally, this scholar would begin to suspect the following: disability was clearly a word that circulated [End Page 1] widely and with a broad range of applications in early America, but it did not yet have the meaning, the reach, or the cultural heft that it carries today. The idea of disability—that is, a set of stigmatized physical and cognitive impairments around which certain exclusionary practices are organized—was likewise at work in early America, but disability was not yet the singular word used to describe it. This tension between the language, the idea, and the history of disability has thus far been one of the factors slowing the broad uptake of disability studies into early American scholarship. We certainly don’t mean to suggest that disability studies is irrelevant for early American literary studies or to devalue the work of scholars who have recently begun work in this direction. On the contrary, the potential contributions of disability studies to the field of early American literary studies are as vital as they are complicated; indeed literary approaches are particularly well suited to tracing intellectual and rhetorical genealogies of concepts like disability through close textual analysis across a range of genres and forms. An important component of this work is historiographic in nature, but, as we argue in this introduction, our approaches have been shaped by a conviction that historiographic work is bound to a set of narrative and discursive forms that literary studies and disability studies are ideally positioned to investigate. Thus, we begin by making manifest the two paths these investigations call on us to follow: first, to consider what the word and the concept of disability each meant in early America, and second, what they mean for the scholarly practice of early American studies today. While easily stated, this intersection of the contemporary and the historical prods us to consider how present-day disability studies understands its constitutive elements before we proceed headlong into the archival work that is most familiar to us. Only when being attentive to the critical histories and political valences of disability in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century do we leave ourselves open to the...

“He Hath Ceased to Be a Citizen”: Stephen Burroughs, Late Loyalists, Lower Canada

“He Hath Ceased to Be a Citizen”Stephen Burroughs, Late Loyalists, Lower Canada John J. Garcia (bio) In 1799, one year after publishing the first volume of his Memoirs, Stephen Burroughs left New England and relocated to the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada. Living in a series of rural communities just north of the Vermont border, Burroughs maintained a farm, oversaw a local mill, and actively counterfeited the paper money of US banks prior to the War of 1812. Like the British province of Upper Canada, the Eastern Townships were a prime destination for Yankee emigrants resettling in the decades following the American Revolution.1 Scholars including Alan Taylor and John I. Little have argued that these “late Loyalists” abandoned the early Republic in response to offers of Canadian land made after 1791 by the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe. The term late Loyalist describes thousands of emigrants who rejected life in the new United States in favor of cheap land, low taxes, and little oversight in the way of state authority. And as Stephen Mihm has demonstrated, those same lax arrangements proved to be attractive to criminals and counterfeiters. Although the largely French-speaking region of Lower Canada’s St. Lawrence Valley attracted fewer emigrants than the Anglophone communities of Upper Canada, Burroughs and others who relocated north of the Vermont border would have been attracted by the region’s geographic and cultural isolation, the scarcity of local justices of the peace, and its distance from the Court of the King’s Bench, located in Montreal (47). Literary scholars working in the post-Revolutionary era have yet to recognize that Burroughs belonged to a generation of Americans who rejected US citizenship and sought to reinvent themselves as British subjects in a borderlands region.2 I argue in this essay that Burroughs and his contemporaries in Lower Canada form a neglected chapter in the afterlife of Loyalism, carrying forward the narrative of Loyalist opposition to the [End Page 591] War of Independence by revealing how successive waves of migrants—the late Loyalists—came into conflict over who owned Lower Canada’s settlements. As we will see, struggles over land between previously settled Loyalists and these later emigrants became the central topic of several early nineteenth-century Canadian publications that identify local spaces as the site of imperial injustice in post-Revolutionary British North America. Putting Burroughs into this British-Canadian context—one of resettlement, ambiguous loyalties, and ruined fortunes—offers a foothold into the region’s controversies while also revealing a web of economic, legal, and political entanglements that bring Lower Canada into the purview of early American literary studies and ongoing historiographical work on the loyalist diaspora. Although an utter failure by virtue of having lost his contest with the law, Burroughs winds up documenting an insider’s perspective on the late Loyalist predicament. In keeping with historiography that argues that “localism, not nationalism” defined culture and society in the Eastern Townships, Burroughs becomes an unlikely but illuminating advocate of the late Loyalists in the localizing, imperializing, and borderlands spaces of post-Revolutionary British North America (Little, Loyalties 10). The breakdown of local authority in Lower Canada described by Burroughs necessitated that the late Loyalists appealed to, and identified with, an imperial rule of law that local elites had supplanted through a system of personal and political privileges. By narrating what happens after he left the United States, Burroughs’s Canadian writings offer a literary recollection of a category of alien subjects who were caught within a local system of rule that deemed them unwelcome. Consequently, some of the late Loyalists described themselves as inassimilable to both British-Canadian forms of law and the political and economic structures of the United States that Burroughs and others like him rejected. Twists of fortune define the life of Stephen Burroughs, and so it should come as no surprise that a rebellious criminal would eventually come to identify with the rule of law as symbolized by the British Constitution. Born in 1766 to a Connecticut minister’s family, Burroughs acquired notoriety for a series of youthful exploits that led to a full-blown life of crime. Expelled from Dartmouth...

Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New EnglandEmpowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early AmericaWriting the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New EnglandEmpowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early AmericaWriting the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

Revolution Is a Fiction: The Way We Read (Early American Literature) Now

Literary criticism may be nearing most significant dispositional shift since advent of New Historicism some thirty years ago. What Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named paranoid reading--interpretive modes that view texts and especially their aesthetic dimensions as covers for abstract and dispersed ideological systems hidden below or behind, methodology I'll join Bruno Latour in calling simply critique--find their fundamental assumptions challenged by theorists sometimes lumped together as postcritique. (1) The desire of literary critics to change what Rita Felski calls mood can be measured by academic traction of various early-stage analyses of--to refer to title of an issue of Representations that helped spur such discussions--the way we read now. Moving forward, those investigations will take different forms in different literary fields, just as New Historicism did. I am concerned here with how such approaches to going postcritique might animate early American literary studies, field that, for reasons I'll explore below, has thus far remained largely impervious to such discussions. In order to jump-start these examinations of our field imaginary, we need first to recognize that critique, in early American literary studies, takes two forms, not one, although both are ultimately rooted in same axiomatic insistence that literature must be understood in relation to broader, more stable, prior, and prioritized locale of meaning (ideology in one, history in other). In addition to suspicious reading, which finds an abstract and hidden systematic agent that literary text either reveals or obfuscates (or both), early American literary studies remains dominated by faith in facts--a fact faith--that constitutes text's historical meaning. Both versions not only locate text's meaning someplace other than in text (what Heather Love and others have criticized as postulations of textual depth), they also deny critic's hand in generating that depth and ideals (or threats thereof) discovered there. The critic's purported disinterest (which I want to redefine here not as an honesty to one's object of study but as disloyalty to one's own imaginative idealism) is maintained through accusations of presentism or biased projection that police borders between objective and subjective criticism (the latter always under suspicious scrutiny). Hand in hand with critical objectivity comes deep skepticism about speculative idealism, and nostalgic faith that literature's meanings lay in recoverable past, not in present or future whose possibilities rely on imaginative hopefulness of critic. These assumptions, I believe, have kept early American literary studies from contributing to substantial methodological (as opposed to content) innovation, especially those centered on imaginative aesthetics of literature and ethical positions it might enable in present. Of critique as suspicious reading--what I'll designate hard critique--the field has no shortage. Let me take representative case study from pages of Early American Literature. An essay about Robert Finley, who was instrumental in founding American Colonization Society to transport freed slaves to African colony of Liberia, starts by observing that Finley began his career as schoolteacher who developed pedagogical strategies adaptable to larger social audiences, and concludes: By advocating expulsion of blacks characterized as lazy, docile, primitive, and violent, society helped make ambition, civilization, and sensibility seem natural and exclusive property of whites and hence of identity. (2) That society came into existence soon after ratification of Constitution, when political leaders struggled to define uniquely American character, suggests, author asserts, central role racial differentiation played in framing of national belonging and in generating a race of Americans in sense of both common public constituency and naturalized group character linked to body. …

Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies

Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies

Richard Beale Davis Prize, 2015

Richard Beale Davis Prize, 2015 Kristina Garvin, Melissa Gniadek, Monique Allewaert, Duncan Faherty, and Sarah Rivett Among the many outstanding essays published in Early American Literature in 2015, Kristina Garvin’s “Corporate Ties: Arthur Mervyn’s Serial Economics” stands out as one of the two most innovative and as such is the co-winner of the Richard Beale Davis Prize for best essay printed in Early American Literature for that year. In “Corporate Ties” (50.3), Garvin deftly evinces how Charles Brockden Brown deploys seriality as both a thematic and a compositional concern within Arthur Mervyn. While most critics gloss over the text’s original incomplete serial publication in favor of classifying it simply as a novel, Garvin foregrounds Brown’s subtle figurations of the complexities of seriality—as both a means of publication and as a narrative style—to define and structure his concerns with risk, speculation, and certainty. In so doing, her essay highlights how the intricacies and uncertainties of post-Revolutionary magazine publication produced a new relationship between authors and readers, one defined in many ways by a continual postponement of conclusion. By attending to how seriality creates a prolonged temporal relationship between consumers and producers, Garvin situates the unfolding of Arthur Mervyn alongside shifts in post-Revolutionary economic practices increasingly designed “to extend credit and pool risk” so as to safeguard investors against market fluctuations. For Garvin, Brown’s figuration of Mervyn’s own serial reinvention of himself embodies a “self-consciously” serial practice that “displaces immediate fulfillment in favor of continued deferral.” In so doing, Garvin exhibits how Brown maps an economic system built upon capitalizing inevitable deferrals onto issues of form and content in an effort to fashion a text that accurately registers a market system designed to mitigate the potential losses of speculation by establishing “financial mastery over the future.” By linking questions of publication history, seriality, economics, and style, Garvin has produced a generative model for the field to rethink its attachment [End Page 545] to the primacy of the novel form, and her essay will appeal to readers with a wide range of interests. In “Mary Howard’s Mark: Children’s Literature and the Scales of Reading the Pacific” (50.3), Richard Beale Davis Prize co-winner Melissa Gniadek takes up a virtually unknown, anonymously authored children’s book, The Little but Affecting History of Mary Howard, published in 1836 by a New Hampshire press. At four inches high and sixteen pages, this chapbook is quantitatively small. What’s more, it seems but a minor work given that it’s a children’s book that stitches together clichés about good God-loving girls who are kind to animals and submissive to fate, even if fate swerves from English girlhood into a captivity narrative when the book’s protagonist is kidnapped and tattooed by a Maori chief. Analyzing this diminutive text whose extant copies are scattered across the East Coast of North America and the South Pacific, Gniadek expands the scope and scale of early American literary studies by orienting the field to still understudied Pacific problems and archives, all the while elaborating on the field’s long-standing concern with race, imperialism, and book history. Gniadek tracks how this chapbook’s bundle of clichés about girlhood, white domesticity, and both of their interruption by the markings of people of color participated in the cultural patternings that sustained colonialisms. Yet the young protagonist’s marking by tattoos introduces a system of marking and meaning that cannot be entirely grasped by either the book’s characters or its readers and is, for this reason, fundamentally different from the Roman alphabet whose mastery the children’s book makes possible. Riffing on the work of Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, Gniadek argues that the marks of tattoos evoke sexual and racial penetrations that Anglo-European persons actually or imaginatively moving through the Pacific disavowed yet also desired. That this motif of disavowal and desire circulates in a children’s book makes clear that early nineteenth-century girlhood is traversed by the desires and transgressions of both adults and children. Moreover, Gniadek’s savvy analysis charts a less masculinist and monumentalizing literary history of...

Conflict Management: Jeremy Belknap’s Committed Literature

Conflict ManagementJeremy Belknap’s Committed Literature David Lawrimore (bio) In recent years, studies of Federalist-era conversation circles have provided a new way to map the intersection between early national print culture and urban intellectual networks. Through explorations of such circles as the Friendly Club and the Anthology Society, scholars including Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan and Bryan Waterman have shown how these groups served as nodal points in a lattice of cultural exchange that strove to cultivate a civil sphere that rose above the factious partisan debates of the period.1 Believing that the disinterested circulation of ideas had the potential for social reform, they produced and exchanged information through a broad range of literary forms, including medical journals, magazines, newspapers, plays, poems, and novels. Scholars have thus identified a symbiotic relationship in which conversation circles relied on publishers to print their writings while publishers relied on these circles to purchase and circulate texts.2 Within this hodgepodge of genres and formats of publication, texts acted as an assemblage of raw materials, open to collaborative emendation and critique. Less invested in maintaining a coherent textual structure, intellectuals remixed and recirculated a broad range of literary output. By focusing on the exchanges within these intellectual networks and on the individuals that constitute them, this scholarship has offered a means to connect a seemingly disparate body of texts and to consider how different genres and formats of publication function. Since this scholarship primarily considers intellectuals who wished to transcend immediate political disputes in favor of broader and deeper epistemic debates, it is less concerned with the intellectuals who were directly involved in the burgeoning state apparatus. This is largely an issue of periodization: most of the men who made up the conversation circles belonged to the first post-Revolutionary generation and did not come of age until after the constitutional debates.3 If we shift our gaze a few years earlier, however, another intellectual network emerges that is closely involved in [End Page 359] the debate surrounding the ratification of the Constitution, especially in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion. Royall Tyler, for example, served as an officer in General Benjamin Lincoln’s anti-Shaysite militia before penning his play The Contrast (1787), which mocks the Shaysites in its portrayal of Yankee Jonathan. The quick suppression of a similar uprising in New Hampshire was mobilized by Nathan Gilman and a committee of Exeter elite that included Samuel Tenney. Gilman was the father and Tenney the future husband of Tabitha Gilman Tenney, whose Female Quixotism (1801) also parodies backwoods agrarians. Similar representations can be located in such diverse works as the Connecticut Wits’ The Anarchiad (1786–87), William Hill Brown’s “Shays to Shattuck” (1787), and Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787).4 Much like the members of the Friendly Club and the Anthology Society, these intellectuals constitute a network of cultural exchange where diverse genres and formats of publication were circulated, revised, and remixed. However, instead of attempting to create a space that transcended immediate political engagement, this network operated in the service of a largely urban class coalition that achieved political and cultural hegemony following the ratification of the Constitution. Jeremy Belknap, a minister, historian, and writer on the periphery of early American literary studies, is a fruitful case study of the intersection between print culture, intellectual networks, and political and class affiliation. On the one hand, Belknap was a prominent intellectual: he belonged to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences—two early, learned associations known for their discussion and publication—and was the principal founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society.5 Heavily involved in two prominent magazines, the American Museum and the Columbian Magazine, he was also a prolific writer who published a range of sermons, histories, biographical sketches, and fiction.6 On the other hand, Belknap was a largely conservative political figure: his desire to preserve authority against the wave of agrarian uprisings places him at the heart of the early Federalist movement, and much of his literary production works in the service of this coalition.7 To find a synthesis that grounds this discussion in the material...

Reading Less Littorally: Kentucky and the Translocal Imagination in the Atlantic World

Reading Less Littorally:Kentucky and the Translocal Imagination in the Atlantic World John Funchion (bio) Let me begin with an obvious observation: the ship has served, as Paul Gilroy succinctly describes in his foundational project, as the "central organizing symbol" for Atlantic studies (4).1 Whether one is describing culturally integrating forces produced by panoceanic routes of commercial exchange, the migration of classical republican thought from Europe to the Americas, the emergence of a diasporic British literary culture in North America, or the formation of a Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, the ship looms large in this work for both intuitive and empirical reasons.2 It traverses what now are deemed arbitrary boundaries between disciplines, periods of study, and national literatures. But the ship is more than just an object of analysis; it's a potent metaphor. It embodies the Middle Passage—a space that conjures up the nightmares of slavery and the dreams of a redemptive return to the African homeland. Yet as intellectually generative as it has proven, the ship—as a trope—potentially delimits as much as it expands our critical imagination. It often docks its dynamism at port; it calls to mind larger communities—perhaps not nations but certainly empires—even while critiquing these power structures. Local forms of affiliation are registered but frequently as static spaces disrupted only by inaugural moments of imperial deterritorialization and reterritorialization.3 I want to pose a potentially absurd question: is it possible for Atlantic studies to give up its favored metaphor—is it possible to abandon the ship? I broach this question to register the relative absence of a dialogue between early Americanist studies focused on local literatures and communities and Atlantic studies scholarship. To consider this absence is to return to one of the central concerns of Michael Warner's "What's Colonial about Colonial America?" Warner pushed back against the "preinterpretive commitment" [End Page 61] to nationalism in early American literary studies and implored his fellow literary critics to engage the problem of colonialism with greater complexity (50). In the decade since this essay first appeared in print, its clarion call has lost some of its urgency. A voluminous number of recently published articles and books addressing the myriad aspects of imperialism, transatlanticism, and Creole culture treat the adjective colonial as anything but an indispensible term.4 This work takes aim at the nationalist impulse that once defined early American studies, but it does so less along the lines Warner originally envisaged by leaving "the question of who gets to be local" largely unaddressed (54). For him, making "the struggle to be local" one of the centerpieces of his transatlantic inquiry necessarily means unsettling the idea of local settlements and treating locality as a contingent rather than as a fixed category (56). By pursuing larger comparative projects, a lot of Atlantic studies scholarship stops short of venturing inland and tends instead to foreground the fluidity of the ship or the routes of commercial and cultural exchange it metaphorically signifies and circumscribes. Though not always rallying around a shared theoretical vernacular, a number of illuminating studies on local literary cultures have moved away from nation-centered readings by focusing on regional literary and political phenomena. When attending to the cultural transformations taking place within the interior, this work regards the Atlantic studies paradigm with varying degrees of skepticism. Postcolonial accounts of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century regionalism explain how "the primacy of the Northeast and the marginality of other regions in the Nation is the product of the nineteenth-century colonization of its provinces" (Watts, American xvii). Others draw on cultural studies problematics to situate colonial discourses and practices within local spaces, by maintaining that writing about the backcountry points to a "cultural distance between the agrarian regions and the Atlantic littoral" (E. White, Backcountry xiii).5 Many print histories conclude that in lieu of a "'nationalized' print public sphere" forming in the years bracketing the US Revolution, "a proliferating variety of local and regional publics scattered across a vast and diverse geographic space" emerged (Loughran xix). Even studies on how maps produced "nationalistic fantasies of interstate unity" have found that early US atlases created "the...

Thinking with Toni Morrison's A Mercy (A Response to "Remembering the Past: Toni Morrison's Seventeenth Century in Today's Classroom")

Thinking with Toni Morrison's A Mercy (A Response to "Remembering the Past: Toni Morrison's Seventeenth Century in Today's Classroom") Lisa M. Logan (bio) We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with. (Turkle 5) In "Projecting Early American Literary Studies," Sandra M. Gustafson and Gordon Hutner observe that "the larger community of Americanists . . . neglected the work of Early Americanists, an omission [End Page 193] that the profession suffered at its peril. . . . Americanists of all specialties needed to know more about the work done in the early period . . . to stimulate their understanding of the field as a whole" (249). Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy (2008), set between 1682 and 1690, anchors this argument, exemplifying, among other things, the power of early American studies and the archive to "correct the powerfully idealizing image of colonial encounter" (249). In contrast to the culturally familiar fiction of early America as an uninhabited New World ripe for the taking, A Mercy presents "the disordered world created by European colonization" in a "dystopian register" (245). For Gustafson and Hutner and the participants in this roundtable on teaching A Mercy in the early American classroom, A Mercy operates as an "evocative object," not simply something we "think with" but a "provocation" to thought and feeling. Morrison's use of the archive resembles the bricoleur's, "combining and recombining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas" (Turkle 4). Through overlapping, entangled histories that complicate notions of a simple, coherent past, the novel stages recent transformations in literary and historical studies, showing both the limits and possibilities of the archive. The novel invites us to "inhabit an alien world, one every American ought to understand or at least be aware of" (Black 32). This disordered and dystopian early America exemplifies "bricolage as passionate practice" (Turkle 5). In the introduction to these essays, Chiara Cillerai contends that A Mercy foregrounds "challenging histories [and] . . . changing academic and intellectual practices." Certainly Morrison "combin[es] and recombin[es]" what Cillerai terms "challenging histories," including King Philip's (Metacomet's) War, the Salem witchcraft trials, Bacon's Rebellion, the Middle Passage, and the construction of slave laws that have affected the colonies and nation ever since. Moreover, the novel depicts the instability of these histories, representing multiple and intersecting axes of identity: race, class, patriarchy, diaspora, religion, culture, folkways, slavery, servitude, motherhood, family, literacy, choice, self-ownership, safety, and security.6 Through Jacob, Rebekka, Lina, Florens, Sorrow, Willard and Scully, A Mercy recovers and reimagines lost, marginalized, and hidden histories—literary, archival, and narrative. Morrison's imaginative, novelistic recovery mirrors the archival work on marginalized people by early American scholars, such as Wendy Anne Warren, whose "'The Cause of Her Grief': The Rape of a Slave in Early New [End Page 194] England," makes a powerful statement: "We have known, for a long time, a story of New England's settlement in which 'Mr. Mavericks Negro woman' does not appear; here is one in which she does" (1049). This emphasis on what is missing or recovered (and why) drives Morrison's novel, according to Susan Curtis, who examines the intertextualities of archive, novel, and cultural narratives about the past and present. For Curtis, the archive operates as an "evocative object," a trove of words that delineate material and emotional realities: an enslaved person's passage, a contract, treaty, indenture; documents in the archive; human behavior; signs on the human body itself; and signs and wonders of the natural and invisible worlds. Florens frames the dilemma: "One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?" (Morrison, A Mercy 3). Cillerai, Curtis, and Bross ask it this way: what are we able to read, and why are we able to read it? As Warren writes, "We make our way among...

Science and the Atlantic World in Early American Literary Studies

Although scientific literatures by British American colonists have not traditionally been included in studies of early American literature, recent work has begun to pay closer attention to the literary elements of natural, medical, and cartographic texts produced in the long 18th century. New approaches have expanded Eurocentric and nation-based paradigms by positioning colonial science in an imperial and Atlantic World context that focuses upon transatlantic exchanges between the British Americas and England. These studies have investigated colonists’ efforts to obtain credit for their scientific contributions in England and the strategies with which colonists resisted metropolitan biases regarding their knowledge. Studies of the literature of place show how natural histories, cartographies, and nature writing rendered the New World familiar, even while establishing colonists’ relationship to and possession of the land. Meanwhile, an emerging focus on anxieties regarding mental and physical degeneration, spurred by theories of America’s degrading influences, offers new directions for investigating colonial subjectivity and racial theories of difference. Finally, examining the various roles that Native Americans and New World Africans played in colonial encounters may facilitate new approaches to non-European contributions to colonial science.

Two New, Significant Volumes Treating Early American Literature

Two New, Significant Volumes Treating Early American Literature John C. Shields Kevin J. Hayes , ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Pp. xv, 636. $150.00. David S. Shields , ed., American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Library of America, 2007). Pp. xxiii, 952. $40.00. Recent years have marked the appearance of two major contributions to the field of Early American literary studies: American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, selections and notes by David S. Shields, and The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. As the first two centuries of American literature remain in serious need of concentrated and comprehensive explorations, these two volumes are welcome arrivals, though I do have reservations about both. As do all Oxford Handbooks, The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature promises to provide concerned readers with a fresh and authoritative approach to the field of Early American literary studies. The Hayes collection has much to recommend it. In his "Introduction," for example, Hayes is studious to point out the importance to Early American literature that the new-found land (new at least to white folks and Africans) exercised on Early American literary productions; I agree with Hayes's judgment here. Moreover, I warmly endorse his determination to bring the parameters of Early American literature to encompass that writing produced within the boundaries of the "British colonies on the American mainland and, after 1776, in the United States" (16). These parameters, according to Hayes, include the period "to the mid-1790s" (16). To cast about for new texts among writings produced in parts of New France, New Spain, and the Caribbean dilutes a more certain and more teachable focus on those literary works composed within the colonial and incipient United States of America. Hayes and his contributors miss the mark, however, when first, they promote prose over poetry; second, they all but ignore the major role classicism contributes to the shaping of Early American (and general American) cultural consciousness; and, third, they determine that the body of Early American letters woefully lacks a close participation in the field of literary aesthetics. Prose, for example, comprises the subject of 530 pages out of a total of 611, leaving merely 81 or so pages for poetry. As for the pantheon he proposes for literary productions before the mid-1790s, Hayes names St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton (1712-56), and Captain John Smith. Note that not a single poet numbers among the figures on this list. Why are Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Mather Byles, Phillis Wheatley, and Philip Freneau not celebrated as major authors? This bias toward prose is clearly predicted by Carla Mulford, one of Hayes's contributors, in her recently published Early American Writings (Oxford UP, 2002); in an anthology of 1124 pages, 152 are given to poetry, but 972 to prose, roughly mirroring the proportion of prose to poetry we have observed of the Hayes collection. In his "Introduction" Hayes claims to be inclusive. In his words, "There has never been a comprehensive, collaborative literary history of early American literature—until now" (13). I am certainly not convinced that Hayes and his contributors have produced a text that comes [End Page 412] even close to his overweening assertion. The genres he identifies, which he and his contributors would have us believe cover the literary output of Early Americans, comprise autobiographies, captivity narratives, diaries, novels, plays, political writings, promotional tracts, slave narratives, travel writings, natural history and history discourses, "Native American voices" (one chapter), "and poetry," which out of twenty-six chapters "receives three" (17). One might question the inclusion of Jonathan Edwards, who was assuredly one of our first and most original philosophers (vide his Freedom of the Will) and must be considered a master of homiletics but hardly of creative letters, and John Smith, a champion of promotional narrative, a genre not heretofore raised to such high status. As Edwards has been elevated to major author, where are other treatments of authors who composed homiletic literature? Although the chapter on "Revolutionary Verse" does briefly, but wholly inadequately, treat epic, where are the considerations...