Time and Space in American Literary History

In one of the 26 contributing essays to Finding Colonial Americas, Kevin Hayes reconstructs the reading experience of the early eighteenth-century historian Thomas Prince, who scrupulously read the Virginia texts of John Smith and consulted French historiographic as well as English and colonial American historical texts before writing his own history of New England. The essay wonderfully illustrates the dependence of this local history on a transregional and intercontinental network of texts. The many books Prince consulted helped him to define the temporal mode of his history as well as its spatial shape, for among Prince's sources was Pierre Le Moyne's 1695 Of the Art Both of Writing and Judging of History, which distinguishes between history—"a continued Relation, that has all its Parts fastned together, as those of the Body or regular Edifice"—and annals—a collection "whose Parts not being joyn'd, without Correspondence, without Union, are only rude Heaps of Materials" (Le Moyne 54; qtd. in Finding Colonial Americas 367–68).While this distinction between history and annals might seem somewhat simplistic, it is also quite thought-provoking in the context of the two titles under review here and their implicit engagement with forms of literary historical narrative. Emory Elliott's Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature and Carla Mulford and David Shields's edited collection Finding Colonial Americas offer representations of the scope and shape of colonial American literature and culture that are as different in their form as in their content. In fact, while one is quite clearly a completed story, the other might more accurately be called an unfinished map, such that reading these two books together generates critical and fascinating questions about the temporal and spatial frameworks that have organized (or may yet organize) American literary history and have determined (or may yet determine) colonial America's place in that history.

Some of the differences between the Elliott and Mulford-Shields volumes—and part of the challenge of reviewing them together—can be attributed to the demands and conventions of their very different genres. Elliott, for example, writes an introduction, a genre that depends on the retrospective functions of reviewing, synthesizing, and summarizing significant texts and authors, as well as major trends and changes within a scholarly field of study. Elliott is of course a master of this genre, having over the years written a number of useful synthetic overviews of early American writers, as well as edited several indispensable American literary histories. Mulford and Shields, on the other hand, work in the very different generic terrain of the festschrift, a collection that brings together contributions that acknowledge and explore the fields of inquiry opened up by a prominent scholar's work. Finding Colonial Americas recognizes and honors the influence and vision of Professor J. A. Leo Lemay, who—as this volume amply attests—has likewise left a significant mark on early American studies, and who well deserves this timely collection.

Despite their very different audiences and generic conventions, however, both books offer in one form or another a survey of early American studies. Yet even a quick look at the table of contents in the Mulford and Shields volume indicates that work on the eighteenth century dominates this collection, which also focuses primarily on the regions of the South and Franklin's Philadelphia (foci that obviously reflect the book's goal of honoring and extending Lemay's work). Elliott, on the other hand, focuses just as exclusively on the seventeenth century and concentrates on the region of New England and its Puritan writers. If a relative newcomer to the discipline were to read these two books, he or she might very well conclude that there are two distinct fields within early American studies that share little other than a vigorous interest in Benjamin Franklin.

While I do not wish to overread...