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  • Literature to 1800
  • Scott Slawinski

Literature written prior to 1700 draws less attention this year than that of the 18th century. While the Puritans take center stage in studies centered on the years before 1700, scholars interrogate a wide variety of texts and authors from the 18th century from an impressive array of theoretical and historical approaches. Poets, British Loyalists, novelists, and plantation owners are all placed under the literary lens of investigation. Though Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown remain perennial favorites, scholars also scrutinize other and lesser-known writers of fiction. Some interests across the field coalesce around such topics as the American gothic, disabilities studies, and the book trade. Though the work of bringing to light new authors—particularly from marginalized groups—is an ongoing project, new knowledge emerges regarding familiar texts, and well-known authors are given fresh understanding through investigations of their lesser-known works.

i New England Puritans

The New England Puritans remain a steady scholarly concern, attracting calls for new editions and investigations of trauma, commerce, and theology and individuality. A new collection of essays centering on these early settlers also demonstrates the dynamism of the field.

Arguing that available editions of Anne Bradstreet's poems misrepresent her work and are outdated in their scholarship, Margaret Olofson Thichstun's "Contextualizing Anne Bradstreet's Literary Remains: Why [End Page 207] We Need a New Edition of the Poems" (EAL 52: 389–422) calls for a new edition that situates Bradstreet's corpus within what is now known about "seventeenth-century women's education, literary activity, and circulation practices and will lead to a better understanding of her life and output." Meridith Styer's "The Pen of Puritan Womanhood: Anne Bradstreet's Personal Poetry as Catechism on Godly Womanhood" (RhetRev 36: 15–28) contends that Bradstreet's personal poems about her family "function rhetorically to define Puritan godliness as a public performance of community-sanctioned, gendered action," thus navigating the tension inherent in Puritan life between theology and religious practice.

Focusing on the end of the seventeenth century, Kathleen Kennedy's "On Writing the History of So Much Grief: Cotton Mather's Decennium Luctuosum and the Trauma of Colonial History" (ECent 58: 219–41) highlights sorrow and mourning in Mather's narration of King Philip's War as strategies to make sense of the tragedy, particularly in Maine, and to ease the trauma experienced by the survivors and reintegrate them into the wider Puritan community. Joe Conway's "'To Banter the Age': Sir William Phips and the Wonders of the Modern World" (EAL 52: 271–97) considers the impact Sir William Phips and his discovery of a treasure ship had on the thinking of Cotton Mather, Daniel Defoe, and Hans Sloane. Whereas Mather hailed Phips's miraculous find as reinforcing faith in New England's covenant with God, Defoe expressed skepticism about Phips as a model of successful commerce, and Sloane examined Phips's success as a demonstration that the unseen plays a role in modern science and finance.

The essays collected in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, ed. Bryce Traister (Cambridge), "reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories." Part 1, "Unexpected Puritans," draws connections between Puritan studies and persons, ideas, or objects not usually associated with it. The section opens with Paul Downes's "Sovereignty and Grace: Hobbes and the Puritans" (pp. 23–37), which explores competing ideas of political and religious sovereignty, grace, and humanitarianism in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Cotton, John Winthrop, and Edward Taylor. Nan Goodman's "Sabbatai Sevi and the Ottoman Jews in Increase Mather's The Mystery of Israel's Salvation" (pp. 38–53) argues that Mather saw the Jews of the Ottoman Empire as "resist[ing] assimilation and achiev[ing] a presence [End Page 208] sufficiently large to exercise political agency," providing a pattern that Puritans might follow as they established themselves in the New World. In "Benjamin Colman, Laughter, and Church Membership in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts" (pp. 54–69) Michael Schuldiner examines Boston clergyman Benjamin Colman's 1707 pamphlet Government and Improvement of...

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