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"American literature -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- History and criticism"
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The Cambridge companion to early American literature
\"Most communications are not written down. This is as true now, in a supposedly information-saturated age, as it was in early colonial America. The point stands even if we understand the Western notion of \"writing\" with a generously broad interpretation, as including all forms of inscribed human communication. Some of what was transmitted among people of the past, consequently, we have to leave to the void or to the imagination-the uncountable facial expressions; the furtive gestures; a thousand accents; the qualities of colors; the taste of a 1628 Madeira; the movements of an Inca khipucamayoc at work. For others, we have well-elaborated historical frameworks and methods of recovery. In the fields of art history and architecture, historical performance in music and dance, theatre history, material culture studies, and ethnobotany, for example, ways to read much of the uninscribed have been maintained and extended. And there are other domains in which the unwritten of the past has been vectored into the present, including Indigenous communities across the Americas, the church, women's communities, annual festivals from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro, and scholarly institutions, with their many rituals and forms\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Empowering Words
Standing outside elite or even middling circles, outsiders who were marginalized by limitations on their freedom and their need to labor for a living had a unique grasp on the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion. In Empowering Words, Karen A. Weyler explores how outsiders used ephemeral formats such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers to publish poetry, captivity narratives, formal addresses, and other genres with wide appeal in early America. To gain access to print, outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons. They wrote individually, collaboratively, and even corporately, but writing for them was almost always an act of connection. Disparate levels of literacy did not necessarily entail subordination on the part of the lessliterate collaborator. Even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing, and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics. Empowering Words covers an array of outsiders including artisans; the minimally literate; the poor, indentured, or enslaved; and racial minorities. By focusing not only on New England, the traditional stronghold of early American literacy, but also on southern towns such as Williamsburg and Charleston, Weyler limns a more expansive map of early American authorship.
eBook
Red Ink
The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. Author Drew Lopenzina reexamines a literature that has been compulsively \"corrected\" and overinscribed with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture, while simultaneously invoking the often violent tensions of \"contact\" and the processes of unwitnessing by which Native histories and accomplishments were effectively erased from the colonial record. In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective.
eBook
The Importance of Feeling English
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American \"re-writings\" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
eBook
Spectacular Suffering
Spectacular Sufferingfocuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves.
The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders.
Spectacular Sufferingthen turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves' petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves' embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion-African slaves-negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery.
Throughout, Mallipeddi's keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights.Spectacular Sufferingis an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.
eBook
Mapping region in early American writing
\"The essays collected in Mapping Region in Early American Writing study how American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions--imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively--played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. The texts they study--some canonical, others archival, some literary, others scientific, polemical, or documentary--create and reveal important mental mappings and cartographies that reveal how a diversity of populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their nation as occupying various places in the American landscape\"--Provided by publisher.
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American Lazarus : religion and the rise of African-American and native American literatures
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America.Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, \"the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.\" This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up.
eBook