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  • Resources for Early American StudiesCompanion Texts, Part III
  • Marion Rust and Kristina Bross (bio)
Good News from New England
edward winslow
Edited by kelly wisecup
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
180 pp.

In this third installment of "Resources," exceptionally attentive readers will notice a word missing from the section heading: teaching. Let me explain. A few months ago, my editorial assistants and I were sitting around a pile of recently published critical editions, faced with a familiar conundrum: did we emphasize these works' contribution to the scholar's lair or to the classroom? The answer, of course, is "both." But how capture that duality in a discipline wherein "critical edition" and "textbook" can seem so far apart? Finally, one of us—and I do not remember which—came up with a term we could all agree on: companion texts. So here you have it: six brief critical assessments of the very matter of our field, books that represent the editorial craft in all its variety. From colonial promotional texts to black Canadian studies; from the earliest published native woman author in the United States to Thoreau, Douglass, and Emerson: each of these editions has something to offer us all in the way of intellectual companionship.

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Good News from New England
edward winslow
Edited by kelly wisecup
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
180 pp.

In her wide-ranging introduction to this valuable edition of Edward Winslow's Good News from New England, Kelly Wisecup notes the neglect of this key text of New England colonialism. The work is passed over in major anthologies of early American writings in favor of Of Plymouth Plantation (1647) and New English Canaan (1637) (15–16). That neglect is especially unfortunate because, as Wisecup suggests, unlike William [End Page 209] Bradford's and Thomas Morton's focus on conflict—either cross-cultural or internecine—Winslow's account of New England is more nuanced. His familiarity with Algonquian languages and cultures and his willingness to credit native assistance to English colonists, she argues, resulted in a text that "complicates the genre" of seventeenth-century promotional writings (5). She makes a persuasive case that if we wish to read the literatures of New England in their own historical context rather than "in the context of later cross-cultural conflicts," Winslow's work deserves to be included in our classroom discussions (17).

We early Americanists have largely moved away from a teleological understanding of American literature in which colonial American literature is understood as a forerunner to the "proper" literature of the United States. But perhaps our syllabi, especially those for our survey courses, do not always reflect that critical view of our field. By putting stories of conflict—particularly native-European conflict—at the start of our literary histories and literature surveys, we continue to foreground works that established the myth of the inevitable triumph of English colonists over the "vanishing Indian." Of course, early Americanists have tried various approaches to complicate our literary histories. Bradford and Morton may hold sway in the major anthologies when it comes to New England, but the Norton, Heath, and other collections also take care to include Spanish, French, sometimes German colonial texts. They include transatlantic approaches and indigenous oral traditions. Nevertheless, I suspect that despite our best intentions many of us jump right into the English tradition, and even if we start with Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca or the Jesuit Relations, few of us sustain a truly multifaceted approach throughout the whole term of an early American literary survey. Whether or not we decide to start with New England, Wisecup's edition of Winslow allows us to apply new critical approaches to English colonial texts.

What would it mean to put Winslow's text in conversation with or even in the place of other works? Wisecup argues that if we do, the text demands we grapple not only with Winslow, with his faith, or with his wonder and fear in the face of "New World" challenges, all elements we can find in other promotional and travel literatures coming from New England writers of his day. To do it justice, we also must consider how he...

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