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  • Early American Literature and American Literary History at the "Hemispheric Turn"
  • Ralph Bauer (bio)

As several contributors to this issue have noted, the field of early American literary studies was born with the "Puritan origins" model in which the significance of early American ( particularly Puritan New England's) literary and cultural productions was often appreciated mainly in terms of what they contributed to the later national (literary) culture of the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the 1990s, however, early Americanists issued their "declaration of independence" from the literary history of the American nation-state, objecting that the proto-nationalist paradigm is anachronistic and had done a disservice to a full appreciation of the rich and diverse cultural productions of the colonial Americas, which included not only geographical and cultural areas outside Puritan New England (such as Catholic Maryland) but also geographical areas not now part of the US (such as the Caribbean or Canada).1 One of the ironies of this declaration of independence from the proto-nationalist "origins" model, however, has been that early American literature has once again become British. Early Americanists have redefined their field as the "literature of British America," engaging in more and more dialogue with their colleagues, not in American but rather in English Renaissance and eighteenth-century studies, while their colleagues in these fields, inspired by the postcolonial studies movement, have been interested in issues of empire and colonialism.2

Although the rejection of the "origins" model in early American literary studies has greatly energized the field and its [End Page 250] institutions, it may have done so, as the editors of this special issue have noted, at the cost of becoming isolated from American literary studies at large. From this point of view, the "hemispheric turn" that has recently swept through American literary studies in all of its subdisciplines would seem to offer an opportunity for revitalizing the conversation between early Americanists and Americanists with an emphasis on later periods.3 Whereas the transatlantic approach has usually emphasized the relations of each new-world culture to its old-world counterpart—affinities of language, cultural heritage, or racial ancestry, for example—the hemispheric approach has generally emphasized the relations among and similarities between the literatures and cultures of the New World, focusing on what distinguishes the cultures and literatures of the New World at large from that of the Old—the colonial past and neocolonial present, for example, racial and cultural diversity, processes of transculturation and creolization, and so on. Thus, some early Americanists have begun to explore colonial literatures not originally written in English, both within the geographical bounds of British America (such as the colonial German literature in Pennsylvania) and outside, including the literatures of New France and French Louisiana, as well as the vast field of colonial Spanish and Luso American literatures written in both North and South America, while some colonial Latin Americanists have begun to consider British-American texts.4 Similarly, nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary scholarship has seen a veritable explosion of hemispheric scholarship since the 1990s, as presidents of the American Studies Association have deliberated renaming the ASA the "Inter-American Studies Association," as entire new journals and special issues devoted to hemispheric studies in established journals have appeared, as well as new book series, literary anthologies, digital archives, university-based study programs, transinstitutional studies networks, congresses, institutes, and new professional organizations championing a hemispheric approach to American studies.5

However, curiously, the "hemispheric turn" across the subdisciplines of American literary scholarship has so far done little to remedy the apparent segregation of early American studies from American literary studies on later periods, if the bibliographies and tables of contents of prominent recent monographs and collections may serve as an indicator.6 In part, this lacuna may be due to a number of differences in archive and methodology between hemispheric scholarship on the colonial period and that on the national period. Whereas nineteenth- and twentieth-century hemispheric scholarship has been able to focus on inter-American literary, cultural, and demographic exchanges across the Americas and [End Page 251] between the American nation-states that became increasingly pervasive beginning with the early nineteenth...

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