Book Review Editor’s Note

I have been reading Early American Literature for years. More than any other journal, it is responsible for forming me as an “early Americanist” and challenging me to continually rethink what that phrase means. I’m thrilled to come on as book review editor with volume 47. My deep appreciation goes to EAL editor Sandra Gustafson for thinking of me. I’d also like to thank Stephanie Straub, my editorial assistant here at the University of Kentucky, for helping make this year’s reviews what they are so far.

The variety of books reviewed in this issue represents the current diversity of our field. Criminality, commerce, Native American print culture, Ibero-American and Francophone hemispheric studies, African Americanist cultural geography, textual scholarship: these are just a few of the topics and modes encompassed in volume 47’s reviews. From an (eco) critical edition that revolutionizes our understanding of naturalist William Bartram to the monograph that the Modern Language Association judged the best of 2010—Philip Round’s Removable Type: A History of the Book in Indian Country—one begins to see just how wide our range is compared with even a decade ago. And yet Early American Literature is also still one of the best places to read about Anglo-colonial religious practice (Reiner Smolinski’s edition of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana, reviewed in the last issue) and early national feminist studies (two upcoming review essays, one on women’s personal narratives and another on recently published critical editions of post-Revolutionary novels by women). Our field has always embodied a fierce twin commitment to tradition and innovation; and it has always been highly self-reflective regarding its own epistemology (see the recent issue on the relationship between the historical and the literary in early American studies, jointly published with American Literary History). Most importantly, it has long embraced all levels of knowledge production as equally worthy of attention. In this, it became a pioneer in cultural and American studies despite its occasional nostalgia for teleologies of nationhood. Early Americanists embrace an aesthetics of the ordinary, whether cheaply bound, fragmentary, handwritten, or scrawled in the margins. In these seemingly unpretty things, we find untold value. These qualities drew me to early American studies in the first place, and I am proud to see them flourish and to help them along.

What would I like to see more fully represented in future volumes? Much has already begun. We review conferences and exhibits, in acknowledgment that print alone does not a field make. We discuss critical editions, monographs, and coauthored works from a wide range of perspectives and more than one language, in keeping with the opportunities recent scholarship allows us both to traverse US borders and consider their circumstances of origin. We employ a range of reviewers, from beginning assistant professors to emeriti faculty. More generally, Early American Literature sustains a vision of the field as ever changing and eternally engaging.

If I had three wishes for the future of the review section, they would be the following. First: I would like to begin considering books from a wider range of disciplines, including art history, anthropology, geography, comparative literature, and the many interdisciplinary fields (LGBT studies, performance studies, and Latin American studies come immediately to mind) that now have a foothold in the academy. Early American literary inquiry already crosses disciplinary lines at will; as book review editor, perhaps I can do the same with publishers’ catalogues. In the process, I would like to hear more about poetry, song, and performance, among other things.

Second, I would like to foreground scholarly practices that we already take for granted. For instance: early Americanists make use of perhaps the most developed digital archive of any field housed in a literature department. I’d like to publish reflections on the effects these and other methods of investigation have on our work, while also continuing to seek out digital archives and scholarship for discussion in their own right.

Third (and this has as much to do with what gets published as what gets reviewed), I hope early Americanists will continue to develop confidence in...