Explore the vast range of titles available.

The poems exchanged by Dutch West India Company officers Johan Farret and Petrus Stuyvesant—later director general of New Netherland—during their stay on Curaçao call attention to an understudied genre of friendship poetry within the earliest settler literature from the Americas. The poems' method of collection and distribution differs from the printed verse that has entered the early American canon. Moreover, Stuyvesant and Farret's occasional and friendship verse celebrated aspects of the Dutch Empire and thus differs from the familial or religious focus of the canonical poetry by early English or German colonists. Stuyvesant and Farret's poems participated in a flourishing Dutch tradition of civic verse, which was neither courtly nor churchly. The act of writing such friendship poetry was more important than the poems' contents, and the poems' gestures of affection display how male affect and friendship networks channeled imperial ambition and advancement within the Dutch Atlantic. And finally, because one poem concerns Stuyvesant's lost leg, these works offer an interesting contribution to disability studies. Taken as a whole, these verses alert us to how different literary composition looked on the margins of empire when compared with the writings that are now commonly anthologized. Stuyvesant and Farret's poems are both strikingly Dutch and remarkably Atlantic.

Two exceptional colonial poems, Thomas Morton's version of the events around his Maypole at Merrymount and Benjamin Tompson's epics on King Philip's War, are heavily classical, especially in their descriptions of Native Americans. The essay examines the advantages that the use of classical comparisons have over the more common tropes of Biblical typology.

With regard to the Anglo-American canon, Bradstreet's classical- Christian style and Edward Taylor's antique types clearly connect New England Puritanism to the colonial poetics discussed. [...] Phillis Wheatley's translations of Ovid, coupled with the omnipresence of Ciceronian rhetoric in Revolutionary pamphlets, show the ongoing influence of the classics on American literary development.

In Transformations of Love, Frances Harris reconsiders the notorious friendship between John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin \"in the context of the post-Reformation debate concerning marriage and the much longer and less studied tradition of intense friendships between men and women in religious settings\" (3). After the birth of their three sons, Evelyn took his children's education to hand, but, when two boys died within weeks of each other, he sunk into an abyss of despair and depression. According to Harris, Evelyn \"had never expected a wife to satisfy his desire for romance and idealism.

This chapter argues that the scenes of lynching, death, and burial depicted in The Souls of Black Folk represent W. E. B. Du Bois's emotional response to the appalling black mortality rates that he encountered as a social scientist. Du Bois was one of the few voices arguing against racist theories of death. Du Bois first refuted the myths about blacks and death in 1896, when he was instructed to study the morbidity and mortality of the black population of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, written in response to racist propaganda, tries to refute the association of African Americans with death. In nineteenth-century sentimental literature, sympathy often achieved the effect Du Bois envisioned. In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt also centres the opportunity for interracial recognition on a black corpse. Du Bois and W. Chesnutt both lament the lack of cross-racial understanding and sympathy that results from social segregation.

My dissertation examines how the experiences of diaspora and intercultural contact shaped aesthetics in the transatlantic seventeenth century. I argue that when the cultural productions of early transatlantic immigrants and Native American communities are read within larger networks of exchange and representation, they reveal patterns of colonial adaptation and transformation. By reading the expressions of English, French, and German immigrants, as well as Algonquin, Mahican, and Delaware Indians, I aim to make explicit the diverse and multilingual reality of colonial North America. My comparative considerations of colonists' and Native performances show a convergence of discourses and depictions that creates a transatlantic aesthetic. My chapters consider three structured ritualized behaviors: telling, singing, and mourning, which loosely correspond to the generic categories of autobiography, psalmody, and elegy. I begin by studying the tropes of physical distress in New England conversion narratives, which inscribe the trauma of immigration onto the body politic. Algonquin conversion narratives reconfigure this emphasis on corporeal affliction and thereby seem to sanctify scenes of Native suffering. Like the Puritan and Indian confessions, the accounts of French Huguenots also render the effects of displacement and violence, although they do so through irony and sarcasm. My considerations of singing open with the Bay Psalm Book, which puts forth a new notion of spiritual translation and poetic beauty by stressing literal fidelity and formal regularity. Moravian missionaries develop a more flexible and intercultural practice of congregational singing by including Mahican and Delaware verse in their performances of polyglot harmony. Finally, I argue that the proliferation of mourning materials, in particular broadside funeral elegies, in colonial New England indicates the communal anxiety and instability caused by the dual pressures of immigration and intercultural contact. These six instances of literary and cultural adaptation in the colonial contact zone thus reveal larger processes of aesthetic change and transformation. \"Towards a Transatlantic Aesthetic\" not only posits a new model for understanding early America, but ultimately investigates what happens when communities migrate, different peoples meet, and cultures collide.

Van der Woude reviews Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B Fisher and Matthew D O'hara, Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities edited by Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazzotti, Fmnirec of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic by Linda Gregorson and Susan Juster, and Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C Mancall.