Literature to 1800

The study of American literature prior to 1800 remains a strong and vibrant field that continues to produce innovative and enlightening scholarship. A number of published pieces interrogate theoretical and pedagogical assumptions about the colonial and federal periods, and a variety of lenses are employed to bring the early American period into focus. Race, gender, religion, and print culture remain key topics, but they are joined by explorations of the era's science, seamanship, and notions of citizenship. While most of the pieces investigate writings by familiar, canonical figures, lesser-known texts and authors continue to attract significant attention.

i Theorizing Early American Literature

Publications commenting on methodology and teaching and introductions to several topics-oriented special journal issues allow opportunities to theorize scholarly and pedagogical practice and the state of the field. These pieces range from discussions of specific book studies to changes in how to define the field to decisions about what to teach in the classroom.

Michael Boyden's "Introduction to Special Issue: The New Natural History" (Early American Literature [EAL] 54: 633–41) notes that recent studies of early American natural history have been invigorated by reconsiderations of Enlightenment thinking, the pressing nature of the current ecological crisis, and a reinvestigation of the archive. His introduction also reviews a number of challenges facing scholars who wish to pursue research about this topic, including issues of terminology, a weak research infrastructure, biases favoring natural history texts that significantly affected literary history, and language barriers. (As Boyden so aptly asks, "Who, in the four quarters of the globe, reads Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in the original?") He closes out the piece with a comment on the five essays constituting the special section (pp. 633–820), including one of his own, covered below. In another approach to scholarly thinking, Agnes Andeweg's "Allegory as Historical Method, or The Similarities Between Amsterdam and Albania: Reading Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste" (EAL 54: 329–42) questions Gikandi's method of reading allegorically through her discussion of a Rembrandt painting and an exploration of his inconsistent use of contextualization, ultimately arguing that his historical interpretations are debatable. In "Space, Time, and Purpose in Early American Texts: Starting from Igbo Landing" (EAL 54: 21–36) Thomas Halleck argues for replacing a chronological or period approach to early American studies with a geographic approach, speculating about how a spatial approach would shed new light on the field. Turning to pedagogy, Paul Lewis pleads for including in the classroom what he admits is "arguably the worst play ever written, performed, and published" in "Teaching the Terrible; or, Taking William Charles White's Orlando; or, Parental Persecution, a Tragedy, to School" (EAL 54: 621–32). Lewis bases his advocacy on the play's interest in various social relations, its contrast with other works from the period, and its utility in initiating discussions of literariness and literary history. Finally, interested in colonial works that were "missing, recovered, reprinted, or read," in Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (Penn.) Lindsay DiCuirci aims to reset the understanding of 19th-century historical consciousness and explores what meanings readers drew from reprints of old books and how divergent stories in the archive disrupted historical narratives. Early authors discussed in their 19th-century context include John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Robert Beverley, George Fox, William Penn, and Christopher Columbus.

ii Indigenous Peoples and Early Settlers

Presettlement Indigenous cultures and early Euro-Native contacts remain vital to the field. Garnering some interest have been competing notions of time and space in the early Atlantic as Europeans and Native Americans began to interact regularly. Jamestown and its most famous colonial figure, Captain John Smith, also attracted some discussion.

Using Indian treaties as a base, Jerome McGann's "Colonial Exceptionalism on Native Grounds: American Literature before American Literature" (Critical Inquiry [CritI] 45: 640–58) looks at the first encounters between early colonial settlers with their sense of European history and a North American continent that already possessed a longstanding and complex history. Angela Calcaterra is also concerned with time and history in "Bad Timing: Indigenous Reception and...