Editor's Note

It can be an editor's misfortune to discover that a forthcoming issue contains two articles about one book. I say can, but not must, because in the case you see here, the applicable term is serendipity. Two articles featured ahead take Edward Winslow's missive from the Plimoth colonists to their English supporters, the 1624 tract Good News from New England, as a point of departure. Far from negating each other, these essays belong together because they employ distinct lenses to engage in complementary social-theoretical investigations. In "'Mercy as Well as Extremity': Forts, Fences, and Fellow Feeling in New England Settlement," Ana Schwartz (University of Texas at Austin) employs "fellow feeling's capacity to be used as a weapon" (343) to demonstrate that material boundaries built to distinguish New England settler colonists from the peoples they arrived among enabled expressions of sympathy that reaffirmed colonial self-interest and furthered the violence the walls themselves presaged. In so doing, Schwartz's article not only particularizes the interdependence of sympathy and atrocity in one important instantiation but reflects upon the practice of "biopolitical discipline" more generally. (The present-day relevance of this model goes without saying.) In "'Vile and Clamorous Reports' from New England: The Specter of Indigenous Conspiracy in Early Plymouth," Andrew Ferris (Princeton University) employs a different concept—paranoia—to similar ends, namely as "a method of representing the settlement's history (and not merely as a mistaken belief about that history)" (381). Taken together, these articles both offer new insights into a particular moment and reflect upon the practice of insight. Accordingly, they epitomize the value that literary study broadly conceived offers early American studies and the scholarly endeavor as a whole.

Three subsequent articles in this issue develop the opening essays' admirable twinning of precise significance and expansive reach. In "Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's 'Curious Book' and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet," Reed Gochberg (Harvard University) conducts a bravura Whitmanesque performance that implicitly plays on the double meaning of leaves (pages and plants). Over the course of her argument, the donation of a single, strange volume to a self-consciously fragile institution comes to illuminate predisciplinary concerns with the concretization, institutionalization, circulation, and preservation of information in a manner that pertains alike to contemporary and current anxieties regarding the (im)materiality of the archive. "Phillis Wheatley, Samuel Hopkins, and the Rise of Disinterested Benevolence" finds Michael Monescalchi (Rutgers University) situating "disinterest" within an evangelical, as opposed to civic republican, context to argue that Wheatley's critique of slavery anticipated that of her correspondent, the antislavery theologian Samuel Hopkins, in its increasing emphasis on abandonment of individual will as a precondition to the alleviation of suffering among marginalized peoples. Through careful attention to subtle shifts in attitudinal bent based on a nuanced grasp of religious philosophy, Monescalchi incisively demonstrates the activist bent of Wheatley's later work. Helen Hunt (Tennessee Technological University) closes out this section of the journal with "Freaks of Fancy: Queer Temporality and Pleasures of Power Play in Female Quixotism." Tabitha Tenney's novel, Hunt argues, situates "women's erotic pleasure" exclusively within transgressive same-sex encounters characterized by "pleasurable violence": "all," she concludes with wry gravity, "in the name of heterosexual romance" (477).

While it is our aim to feature inventiveness, provocation, and discovery on virtually every page of EAL, issue 54.2 may be fortuitously rich in this regard as well. In the category of "Inventions," we feature "Formed>in" by DaMaris Hill (University of Kentucky). Hill's corpus of work is known for resisting classification. In the tradition of Claudie Rankine's Citizen, her recent book, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing (Bloomsbury Press 2019), has already been praised as history (Publishers Weekly seasonal Top 10), nonfiction (Booklist's yearly "Diverse Nonfiction" Top 10), and poetry (BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections"). Hill's contribution here—a first-person, multicentury, transoceanic self-submersion—evokes what she has identified, in tribute to Toni Morrison, as a "keen interest in … 'rememory' as a philosophy and aesthetic practice" (e-mail to editor, included with permission of author). Agnes Andeweg (University College Utrecht), in...