#EarlyAmericanLit: Bringing EAL into the Digital Age

It is amusing to imagine how Eliza Wharton's travails in The Coquette might have concluded had she been tweeting instead of scrawling letters, quill in hand, or perhaps whether Mary Rowlandson would have made a podcast of her narrative, each remove described in a weekly episode wilder than the one before, had the internet only been invented 250 years earlier. While such musings might seem like imaginative writing prompts for an introductory survey class, they remain close to many of the questions that early Americanists encounter regularly in both pedagogy and scholarship. What becomes of letter writing when most in our day simply send a text message? How might the occasionally deceptive narration of captivity narratives remind us of our own posttruth moment?

Early American Literature is working to use contemporary platforms to help bring scholarship in our field into conversation with many such questions. We have recently featured contributions such as Michelle Burnham's "Scholarship as Activism" and Anna Mae Duane's "Early American Studies in the Age of Trump," both of which emphasize this commitment. Additionally, EAL is currently expanding its online presence, both on social media and elsewhere. You will still be able to follow our current account at @Early_Am_Lit on Twitter, where you can now also find links to our Facebook page and website. Look for journal news, updates from the field, links to articles, and much more information important to both our readership and our contributors. As an additional online offering, the journal is now producing The Early American Literature Podcast. Released three times a year concurrently with each issue, the podcast will feature conversations between the editorial team and contributors, giving featured scholars a chance to discuss their work. Available through our website and already in its second episode, the podcast streams free of charge to the public. We hope that our expanded online presence creates accessible spaces for scholars (in a wide sense) to meet, share ideas, and find inspiration to continue to seek out the important and difficult questions of our literary past.