Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800 ed. by Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl (review)

Even while teaching these works, we often don’t realize how much early American writing took the form of short narratives—letters, diaries, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine pieces, and so on. Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl’s new anthology, Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800, captures this sizable part of American literature, making it available for classroom use. As their title suggests, not only does the anthology provide access to a variety of narrative types, it also provides access to writings from a variety of cultures that made up early North America. Intermixing questions of language, genre, print history, cross-cultural exchange, and more, Worlding America is a good source for classroom exploration and discussion.

It is always interesting to see how others have come to less studied texts similar to those I have been using in classes. I have used several short narratives not often typically found in American literature anthologies as a way to introduce Spanish and other non-English texts. I often find these pieces presented as historical sources in academic journals and books rather than as interesting pieces of writing. Therefore, while I teach them as writings, they are often contextualized in historical rather than in literary terms. In contrast, Scheiding and Seidl discuss in their introduction how they want to break the study of these short narratives away from serving solely as precursors to nineteenth-century short stories. For Scheiding and Seidl, while these short narratives are forerunners of Poe’s, Hawthorne’s, and many others’ short fiction, they are interesting works even without that context.

Coming from a literary perspective, Scheiding and Seidl organize their anthology thematically rather than historically. The collection has five parts, each with its own introduction and thematic subdivisions: “Life Writing” includes “Travel,” “Misadventure,” and “Confessions”; “Female Agency” includes “Captivities” and “Authorship”; “The Circum-Atlantic World” includes “Slavery” and “Entrepreneurs”; “Cultures of Print” includes “Orientalism,” “Migrant Fictions,” and “Sensationalism”; and “Ghost Stories” includes “Ghosts,” “Legends,” and “Myth.” European American works by English, French, German, and Spanish writers are included, as are works from Apache, Penobscot, Mayan, Susquehannock, and Huron Native American as well as African American sources.

Selections cover the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The 1800 date of the title is not a clear cutoff, with Hawthorne’s 1836 version of Hannah Duston’s captivity story included alongside Cotton Mather’s 1697 version, and with Washington Irving’s 1824 “The Devil and Tom Walker” included in the “Ghost Stories” part. Too, several of the Native American narratives are late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century records of oral traditions, though several were collected earlier, such as “Azakia: A Canadian Story,” a 1765 French version of a Huron story translated and published in English in 1783, and Benjamin Franklin’s 1784 “The Origin of Tobacco,” a conversation between a Susquehannock elder and a Swedish minister. One of the nice features of this collection, its editors turning to early American periodicals as an important source of short narratives, does mean that the preponderance of selections come from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries. But for this same reason, while several works are by well-known writers, such as Mather and Franklin, more often they are by lesser-known and frequently anonymous writers. Through this feature, the anthology provides teachers and students the opportunity to examine works that are not often anthologized. That exploration will include dealing with narratives that don’t meet our expectations, such as the diary of Edward Taylor’s voyage from England to Boston, more about events and observations of everyday shipboard life rather than the Puritan spiritual autobiography we might expect of the man who pleads in his poetry, “Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.” Scheiding and Seidl’s introductory materials give a good place to start thinking about these unfamiliar texts.

Finally, while...