Editor’s Note

A favorite topic of discussion among early Americanists on panels and at cocktail parties in recent years has been the lack of respect that the field gets from Americanists working in later periods and from the broader field of literary studies. It’s time to find something else to grouse about.

In the notes to EAL 46.2 and 46.3 I celebrated several award-winning books in our area. Two other recent works belong on that list: Joanna Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford UP, 2003), which was the winner of the Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Award for outstanding book in African American literature; and Stephen Shapiro’s The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (Penn State UP, 2009), which won Honorable Mention for the Best Book in American Studies sponsored by the British Association for American Studies.

Now I am delighted to add to this accumulating stack a work by long-time board member Phillip H. Round, whose Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (U of North Carolina P, 2010; reviewed in this issue) has been awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize, the top book prize given by the Modern Language Association. In this beautifully crafted study, Phil uses the methods of book history to open up early Native American writing in ways that will resonate across many areas. You should read it. Your graduate students should read it. Your colleagues should read it.

The next time you find yourself in conversation with a colleague who questions the vitality and relevance of early American literary studies, hand them a list of award-winning titles in the field over the last decade. Better yet, lend them the books.

Another sign of the rising profile of early American studies is its enhanced presence at the American Studies Association conference last fall, where there were fourteen panels on early American topics, as compared to just seven in both of the previous two years. Dennis D. Moore, Annette Kolodny, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, as well as recent ASA presidents Mary Kelley and Priscilla Wald, have all contributed to bringing early American studies roaring back into the ASA.