Literature to 1800

Perhaps this chapter should open with "Dear Reader," given the amount of attention this year to letters, epistolary novels, and even epistolarity as a literary construction. Despite good efforts to extract imperial mindset, biographical material, and authorial intention from missives, a nagging question haunts the margins of all such attempts: can we reliably glean from letters what a writer really thought or felt? This is, in fact, a question epistolary fiction often teasingly invites.

William Scheick wrote the first section of this essay and Jim Egan the second.

i. The Colonial Period

a. Colonial Poetry and Cultural Representation

Tamara Harvey's Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700 (Ashgate, 2008) features Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation. Resisting being defined by a symbolically disempowered body, these women exerted a "feminist functionalism" by fully participating in public discourse. Although they held a traditional understanding of modesty derived from a conventional understanding of postlapsarian human limitations, they also subverted a typical application of this view to women. These women self-consciously engaged gender ideology through "embodied efforts" so that what their female bodies could actually do in life mattered more than what their bodies were said to mean.

In the Way of Nature includes Robert Boschman's claim that Bradstreet was less a protofeminist dissident than an orthodox spokesperson for her own and her colonial community's struggle with various forms of separation. Bradstreet may have inhabited the confines of her kitchen, Elaine Showalter indicates in A Jury of Her Peers, but her themes were timeless—love, loss, doubt, and faith. This poet preferred classical tradition over material encounters in an actual time and place, argues Jim Egan in "Creole Bradstreet: Philip Sidney, Alexander the Great, and English Identities," pp. 219-40 in Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas (No. Car.). Resorting to a "figurative sleight of hand" in the course of revising her elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, Bradstreet refutes the suspicion that New World settlers were prone to degeneration. She does so by broadening Englishness to include British-American identity.

A legend providing an imaginary past legitimizing British cultural hegemony in North America is identified by Derrick Spradlin, who considers a 1734 poem in "'GOD ne'er brings to pass such Things for nought': Empire and Prince Madoc of Wales in Eighteenth-Century America" (EAL 44: 39-70). A more mixed reaction to the New World surfaces in Jeffrey H. Richards's "Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks: Creolism in the Literary Chesapeake, 1680-1750" (Creole Subjects, pp. 133-61). Richards identifies an indentured convicted criminal whose posthumously published poem represents his colonial experiences as an assault on his humanness. Whereas Aphra Behn celebrated creolism as an opportunity for individual social development, Ebenezer Cooke typically remained ambiguous. Even so, Richards suspects that Cooke admired the creole identity of colonial Marylanders and warned that there was more to their culture than prejudiced homeland readers imagined.

The cultural attainments of educated gentlemen are Gregory Afinogenov's subject in "Otium cum Dignitate: Economy, Politics, and Pastoral in Eighteenth-Century New York" (ECS 42: 581-602). These urban verse writers relied on classical pastoral and georgic tropes to articulate their relationships with both nature and society, but they altered these tropes as the city's culture underwent radical changes after midcentury. Then their poems revealed a new mercantile vision of social interconnectedness that marginalized pastoral and georgic legacies.

Lindsay Levy's "Edward Taylor Manuscript Found in Abbotsford Library" (N&Q 56: 235-36) reports that a copy of "The Layman's Lamentation," believed to have been written before the poet immigrated to New England, has been found among papers located in Sir Walter Scott's collection. There are small variations between this copy, not in the poet's hand, and an apparently earlier version in the poet's hand presently preserved at the Redwood Athenaeum. The poet's rigorous application of "both Systematic and 'Mixt' or Philippo-Ramist sources" is highlighted in Harry Clark Maddux's "Effects and Affects: Edward...