11 Literature to 1800

A forum on the present and future directions of early American studies in The William and Mary Quarterly (57) includes Philip F. Gura's "Early American Literature at the New Century" (pp. 599–620), Carla Mulford's "The Ineluctability of the Peoples' Stories" (pp. 621–34), David S.

Shields's "Joy and Dread among the Early Americanists" (pp. 635–40), and Michael P. Clark's "The Persistence of Literature in Early American Studies" (pp. 641–46). The general diagnosis: vigorous health and a long life. One sign of that health is the appearance of A History of the Book in America: Volume 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge), a major undertaking edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall that covers papermaking, bookbinding, copyright issues, forms of colonial print, and the role of women in book production, among other germane subjects.

i Native Americans and Nature in the Colonial Imagination

An early encounter with Native Americans is an important feature of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez (Nebraska, 1999), a rich three-volume work by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz that provides a widely and deeply contextualized discussion of Cabeza de Vaca's Relación. In "The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of Las Casas's Brevísima relación in Europe and the American Colonies" (EAL 35: 107–36) E. Shaskan Bumas informatively documents how a Spanish narrative designed to abolish Amerindian slavery was variously reprinted with mistranslations, misreadings, and misleading illustrations didactically designed to define English colonization as a moral response to Spanish colonial villainy.

Writings by Bartolomé de Las Casas, Jean de Léry, Thomas Harriot, Edmund Spenser, Roger Williams, and John Eliot receive attention in Thomas Scanlan's Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire (Cambridge, 1999). According to Scanlan, these works participate in a tradition of allegory that is less concerned with Native Americans than with constructing a specific Protestant identity. On the other hand, in Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Mass.) Hilary E. Wyss mines commentaries by literate Native Americans, missionary tracts, and captivity narratives in search of significant ambiguities that worked in the opposite direction. Wyss concludes that various Indian converts such as Joseph Johnson and Samson Occom shaped Christian beliefs to suit their needs and in doing so sometimes even strengthened their traditional culture.

Numerous runaway Indians clearly preferred tribal society over submission to English colonists, who managed a scarcity of servants by acquiring Native American female captives. As Michael L. Fickes further observes in "'They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637" (NEQ 73: 58–81), these colonists believed that they were protecting their servants from barbarian treatment. Native Americans, Allan Greer observes in "Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France" (WMQ 57: 332–48), not only worked as servants but sometimes played saintly roles in discourses that traditionally depended on a dualism derived from racial difference. Pertinent here, too, is Greer's edition of The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Bedford). The usual gender dichotomy informing these hagiographic works, Greer reports, is subverted whenever colonial mystics or martyrs are not portrayed in terms of customary male and female attributes.

ii Bradstreet, Taylor, and Early Colonial Poetry

Jevrey A. Hammond's inspired and engagingly written The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge) utilizes an anthropological approach. It emphasizes the communal and personal function of biblically modeled performative scripts ritualistically designed to realign the perspective of mourners to divine will. Puritan ambivalence toward grief as at once sacred and sinful fostered a ritual dialectic structure in the elegy. Essentially writing miniature gospels of the deceased, elegists optimistically urged their audience, first, to read the departed saint as a biblically inspired devotional text and, second, to assume the apostolic role of overcoming self-doubt concerning their Christic mission.

Doubt is also featured in my "Taylor's 'Meditation 1.12'" (Expl 59: 14– 16), which...