Literature to 1800

This year two review-essays, both touching on historicist issues, assess features of the current state of early American studies. Providing a helpful overview in "New Media's Prospect: A Review of Web Resources in Early American Studies" (EAL 39: 577–90), Joanna Brooks describes and evaluates various online sites and then wonders about the effect of these newer media on historicist approaches to the field. In "Colonial Studies" (AmLH 16: 728–57) Ed White and Michael J. Drexler review recent anthologies of early American writings and identify several problems yet to be resolved in the discipline. A primary issue, they contend, is the occluded relationship between the literary and the historical that remains insufficiently addressed.

i First Encounters, Native Americans, and John Smith

In "Geographies of Encounter: Religion and Contested Spaces in Colonial America" (AQ 56: 913–43) Tracy Neal Leavelle considers the Native American appreciation of nature's spiritual power. French missionaries, in contrast to their Indian converts, understood the New World landscape as a fallen space in need of redemptive transformation. For Leavelle, this example of early French attitude indicates that all colonial geographic representation should be read as a form of language construction expressing a worldview. A 1670s convert to Catholicism who became the first Native American saint, Tekakwitha pursued a difficult personal regimen designed to access the spiritual power of the French colonists during a time of unprecedented change for her people. The life of both this woman and a French Jesuit are recalled in Allan Greer's Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford). Highlighting Native American spirituality in particular, Paula Gunn Allen offers freewheeling claims in Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (HarperSanFrancisco). The many problems besetting this highly speculative portrait are deftly identified in a review by Donald K. Sharpes (AICRJ 28, iii: 162–65). In "The Colonial Stage: Risk and Promise in John Smith's Virginia" (EAL 39: 11–40) Joseph Fichtelberg considers how trade with Native Americans affirmed English control over new lands. At the same time, however, trade undermined colonial sovereignty because it introduced unpredictable factors. Smith's representation of Virginia, Fichtelberg concludes, suggested that the colony's future promise was paradoxically intertwined with its violation of the standard cultural paradigms for the English exercise of authority. Marc J. Garcia-Martinez offers an opposite reading in "Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia and Description of New England" (Expl 62: 80–83). Relying on a form of assimilation through rhetoric, Smith depicted the cultures and land of the New World in terms already familiar to his English audience. In Smith's view, then, English culture would simply provide a refinement, not a radical displacement, of New World conditions.

April Lee Hatfield's Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Penn.) indicates how the Spanish example in the New World set expectations for English promoters of colonization, including John Smith. Like the Spanish, Smith exploited established Native American trade routes and affiliations both within and beyond the porous boundaries of the Chesapeake settlement. Hatfield considers as well the importance of nonconformist immigrants to the Chesapeake region and discusses how the Barbados model of slavery replaced indentured servitude in Virginia.

That culturally determined descriptions of America's indigenous peoples eventually influenced both 18th-century responses to emotion and 19th-century attitudes toward the vanishing Indian is a main concern in Laura M. Stevens's The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Penn.). The compassion said to motivate the colonial Christianization of Indians served cultural agendas, especially British imperial interests. These interests, settlers claimed, were benign in comparison with the Spanish model of colonization. British pity, Stevens concludes, was commodified as a virtuous export that would benefit the missionaries' converts spiritually more than it would impoverish them materially.

ii Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and Other Colonial Women

Anne Bradstreet is featured in Margaret Olofson Thickstun's "Milton among Puritan Women: Affiliative Spirituality and the Conclusion of Paradise Lost" (R&L 36, ii: 1–23). Distinguishing between male "either/ or" and female "and/also" approaches to the Puritan goal of weaning affections from the world, Thickstun finds that...