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"American literature 17th century"
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The Earliest African American Literatures
With the publication of the 1619 Project by The New York
Times in 2019, a growing number of Americans have become aware
that Africans arrived in North America before the Pilgrims. Yet the
stories of these Africans and their first descendants remain
ephemeral and inaccessible for both the general public and
educators. This groundbreaking collection of thirty-eight
biographical and autobiographical texts chronicles the lives of
literary black Africans in British colonial America from 1643 to
1760 and offers new strategies for identifying and interpreting the
presence of black Africans in this early period. Brief
introductions preceding each text provide historical context and
genre-specific interpretive prompts to foreground their
significance. Included here are transcriptions from manuscript
sources and colonial newspapers as well as forgotten texts. The
Earliest African American Literatures will change the way that
students and scholars conceive of early American literature and the
role of black Africans in the formation of that literature.
eBook
Early American poetry, \beauty in words\
\"Discusses early American poetry from the early 17th century into the late 19th century, including short biographies of poets like Phillis Wheatley and Walt Whitman ; also has examples of poems, poetic techniques, and explication\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Before the West Was West
Before the West Was Westexamines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 \"western\" texts and asks what we mean by \"western\" American literature in the first place andwhenthat designation originated.
Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the \"American West\" in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s,Before the West Was Westexplores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and the Pony Express, these thirteen essays demonstrate that no single, unified idea or geography defines the American West.
Contributors investigate texts ranging from the Norse Vinland Sagas and Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative to early Spanish and French exploration narratives, an eighteenth-century English novel, and a play by Aphra Behn. Through its examination of the disparate and multifaceted body of literature that arises from a broad array of cultural backgrounds and influences,Before the West Was Westapprehends the literary West in temporal as well as spatial and cultural terms and poses new questions about \"westernness\" and its literary representation.
eBook
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call \"culture,\" she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the \"question of the animal.\"
eBook
Labors Lost
Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
eBook