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American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 578-591



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Salutary Decouplings:
The Newest New England Studies

Ivy Schweitzer

The field of American studies has changed profoundly, irrevocably, in the last decades, but change has come more slowly to early American studies. New scholarship has reconfigured the very definition of the field and its objects of study, and has forced, at least in some quarters, "the severance of the US from its claim of title to America" (Porter 471). That challenging separation opened US literary and cultural studies to a multicultural richness that will continue to redefine the field well into the twenty-first century. Likewise, American studies is being chastised, transformed, and energized by hemispheric and transatlantic perspectives. Early American studies is undergoing a similar renovation. The salutary decoupling of New England and "America," and the more difficult decoupling of New England and "Puritan," have reinvigorated early American studies and shifted its focus south to the Chesapeake and West Indies, to the Southwest and South America. This disciplinary reframing has encouraged comparative approaches to the colonial period, within both the geographic entity of North America and throughout what Europeans called the New World. It has loosened New England's religious straitjacket and freed it from a narrow intellectual history, allowing a far more diverse picture of colonial New England to emerge.

Ironically, the multiculturalism that progressives today advance as a more accurate reflection of contemporary US culture mirrors the multicultural and multilinguistic character of colonial North America. The dominant languages of the colonial period were Spanish and French, with some Dutch, Swedish, and German, not to mention Algonquian and other major Indian dialects. English was a relative latecomer. Even in the late eighteenth century, when Britain controlled most settlements in the East, including what had been New France, many of its subjects [End Page 578] within that vast area did not speak English. An adequate approach to colonial America, therefore, is necessarily comparatist, just as an accurate representation of the literatures of colonial America requires a decentering of Anglo-American writing and the teleology of US nationhood. The same is true, in my opinion, for the linguistic entity William Spengemann has taught us to call "British America," a category encompassing Anglophone writing in or about America that precedes the merely political creation of the US. 1 As a literary and cultural entity (as opposed to a historical or geographical one), it too has been shaped by various linguistic and cultural, hemispheric as well as transatlantic, influences. Here though, I want to examine a different question: how do our understanding and evaluation of the centrality of colonial New England writing change when we open the field to writing in other parts of the British colonial empire and when that field is placed within the complicated contestation of global imperial agendas and creolized cultures?

The residual "Novanglophilia," as Philip Gura terms it, of blinkered critics of early American literature ("Early American" 600), which Richard de Prospo more accurately identifies as a resistant "American ethnocentrism that is disabling American literary scholarship" (251), produced two persistent critical fictions that have been decried in the last decade. 2 First, the patronizing belief that colonial Anglo-American writing is a prologue, progenitor, or mere precursor of the canonized texts of the nineteenth century, not worthy of study in its own right. And second, the problematical idea of an "American" exceptionalism based upon an unexamined notion of nationalism. However, the more we open the field to comparatist paradigms, the less viable a continuist framework, especially one centering on New England, becomes. For example, the captivity narrative, hailed as the most "American" of new-world genres, in its Puritan form has held the attention of literary critics for the past decade. But to read the captivity narratives of the French Jesuits in relation to Puritan narratives requires a reevaluation of the genre, its evolution, and its continuity into later periods of US literature. According to the Jesuit Relations, annual accounts "written" by compilers and wildly popular in seventeenth-century France, the (mainly) male missionaries (compared with the often gestating or...

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