New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing (review)

Studies in American Fiction245 ments makes The Shape ofthe Signifíer-weü worth reading for students of American literature and culture, as well as for those interested in theoretical questions about historicism, identity politics, and economic justice. University of Texas at AustinPhillip Barrish Read, David. New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2005. ? + 177 pp. Cloth: $37.50. At first glance, David Read's New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledgein EarlyAnglo-American Writing(University ofMissouri Press, 2005), seems like a wistful tilting at windmills. In his effort to "present an alternative to . . . interpreting early European colonialism . . . [as] a kind of large-scale intentionality," Read offers readings drawn from a select group of early American texts that highlight "the efforts of individual writers to articulate a historical phenomenon and their own involvement in it" (10, 9). To many readers of early modern English texts and criticism, Read's approach will no doubt sound sound like a reactionary call for a return to old fashioned "intention," canonical works, and new critical formalism. Despite its introductory polemic, however, New World, Known World is not as intransigent as it sounds. It offers several interesting readings of early texts that may indeed benefit scholars in the field by forcing them to test their own interpretive dogmas against some fresh analysis by a wellread disciplinary outsider (Read's previous book examines Spenser and New Spain). Even skeptics ought to grant that Read has chosen works undeniably central to British writing about colonial North America—John Smith's Generali History, William Bradford's OfPlymouth Plantation, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, and Roger William's Key into the Language ofAmerica—whose individual authors were historically significant figures as well. Even if one were to quibble with the validity of Read's periodization (1624-1649) or his exclusion of Anne Bradstreet, enough nagging questions are raised by New World, Known World to excuse its quixotic critical undercurrents. Read's critique finds its intellectual antecedent in Wayne Franklin's Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers (1979), a work that emerged from a growing dissensus in the early American literature community over the "hegemonic " role of Puritanism in colonial writing. Read, in fact, borrows Franklin's conceptualization of the colonial literary milieu as having been born of the "epistemological problem" that the new world created for Europe . Early colonial texts Read therefore calls "knowledge projects" that depend upon "literary objects . . . shaped by and around metaphor, symbol, allegory, irony, affinity to genre, rhetorical technique, poetic diction" (15). 246Reviews Where Franklin's critical foes were scholars who slighted early travel literature and failed to combine "critical and historical methods," Read's adversaries are practitioners of new historicism and cultural studies. Read begins his own assault on early American critical shibboleths by examining John Smith's Generali History for an incoherence that he believes belies many critics' assertions that the work exhibits a "deeply authoritarian , thoroughly politicized system of social control" (32). In particular, Read finds fault with critics' tendency to insist that Smith's descriptions of the Native Algonquians of Virginia are little more than mastering tactics in a larger imperial hegemonic scheme. Read takes pains to show that even in its incoherence, Smith's narrative at least exposes "the existence ofboth consciousness and will among Native Americans" (24). In Powhatan's speeches he finds an "energía' that points away from a coherent colonialist discourse and toward an ironic posture that reflects "persistent habits ofmind" in the colonial American past, suggesting its "powerful otherness" (38). Read is most convincing in pursuing this "incoherence" in his subsequent discussion ofWilliam Bradford, in which he poses the startling question , "Was William Bradford the first economic historian?" Offering a qualified "yes," Read demonstrates that the second section in OfPlymouth Plantation pits "community" against polyglot cosmopolitanism through its meticulous account of Plymouth's business dealings with Isaac Allerton and the Dutch. Here, Read is right on target, taking on overly providentialist readings ofBook II and showing that Bradford had decidedly different goals from those imposed on him by critics who wish to see everything in theological terms. In subsequent chapters on Thomas Morton and Roger Williams, Read explores other avenues...