Literature to 1800

Of particular note this year, Eric Slauter offers a thoughtful reflection in "History, Literature, and the Atlantic World" (EAL 43: 153–86; WMQ 65: 135–66), probing the uncomfortable subject of "the growing trade gap in Atlantic scholarship"—that is, academic historians' apparent disregard or distaste for colonial literary studies. Also noteworthy is the Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, ed. Kevin Hayes (Oxford). Its 27 chapters are mostly defined by genre, including nature writing, promotional works, and histories.

William Scheick wrote the first section of this essay, and Jim Egan the second.

i The Colonial Period

a. John Smith and First Encounters

In Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America (Yale, 2007) Peter C. Mancall digs into the obscure background of an Anglican priest and editor who sought to foster the spread of Christianity to the New World. The revisions made by Hakluyt to the 16th-century editions of his compiled reports of New World journeys result from practical considerations as well as from his hegemonic vision of an expanding English empire. The strategic marketing of the New World's similarities to England is featured in Walter W. Woodward's "Captain John Smith and the Campaign for New England: A Study in Early Modern Identity and Promotion" (NEQ 81: 91–125). Smith relied on various means, including cartographic designs, to promote not only colonization but also himself as an authoritative leader.

What Smith meant by leadership is assessed in J. S. Maloy's The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge, pp. 57–78). Smith employed a "discourse of virtue and corruption" to suggest that men who proved their competence and honesty during colonial endeavors should be trusted with wide discretionary powers. A democratic pulse can be detected in Smith's clear preference for relying on the firsthand experience of local agents over the directive intelligence of homeland principals.

Narrative unreliability interests Sarah H. Beckjord in Territories of History: Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America (Penn. State, 2007). New World accounts by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo contain contradictory information because they were influenced by a humanist desire to separate superstition from religious and scientific truth. Such a goal resulted in less attention to encounters with Native Americans and more reflection on the relationship between narration and truth.

b. Edward Taylor and Colonial Poetry

In "Saving Edward Taylor's Purse: Masculine Devotion in the Preparatory Meditations" (L&T 22: 339–53) Nathan Hitchcock points to the poet's use of a female persona as a device for establishing his manhood. When Taylor employs distinctly masculine references to emasculation and potency, he creates a "sexual dialectic" between submission and empowerment. This performance amounts to a liturgical drama affirming male authenticity and authority. The four volumes making up Raymond A. Craig's A Concordance to the Major Poems of Edward Taylor (Mellen), based on Daniel Patterson's edition of Taylor's poems (2003) and including orthographic variants and homographs, are an extraordinarily valuable scholarly resource.

In "'Cropt by th' Almighties Hand': Allegory as Theodicy in Anne Bradstreet's Poems on Her Grandchildren," pp. 217–28 in Ken Hiltner, ed., Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England (Duquesne), Richard J. DuRocher rejects ironic, countercultural, and subtextual readings of the poet's expression of grief. Such readings are contrary to the poet's intended consolation, which she reinforced by relying on biblical floral imagery to imply a harvest of hope. Another poet who modifies the form of classical elegy to elevate spiritual emotion is the subject of Nanette C. Tamer's "Human Nature Delineated: Richard Lewis's A Rhapsody" (EAL 43: 63–81). Lewis critiques reason as an inadequate moral guide in a world defined by transience.

c. Captivity Narratives and Cultural Representation

Salons and tearooms fostered the literary education of colonial women, reports Caroline Winterer in "The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America," pp. 105–23 in Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture...