Theresa Strouth Gaul
A powerful narrative of absence and inferiority shaped the understanding of early American literary history for most of the twentieth century. Despite work by Roy Harvey Pearce, Perry Miller, and Sacvan Bercovitch, eminent scholars whose careful studies established the richness of the field of early American literature, the canonization and celebration of a narrow range of American authors of the mid‐nineteenth century by scholars like F.O. Matthiessen exerted a firm and unyielding hold over the literary‐historical narrative. Critics typically imagined this approximately 200‐year period – beginning with English Puritan settlement in New England in 1620 and ending in the decade before the beginnings of the so‐called American Renaissance of the 1830s – as possessing only a few moments of literary‐historical significance: the Puritan origins of the American literary tradition, the melding of European Enlightenment ideas with the religious revivalism of the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, and the founding of the American nation and identity in the Revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Anthologies of American literature that began to be published for the burgeoning college enrollments of the 1960s and 1970s promulgated this narrative.1 These textbooks typically presented the work of perhaps a few Puritan writers (often John Winthrop, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Cotton Mather), even fewer early eighteenth‐century authors (perhaps Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd, and Jonathan Edwards), and a handful of Revolutionary‐era figures (likely Benjamin Franklin, John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, and Philip Freneau). The period from the Revolutionary war to 1820 was usually ignored, though perhaps some attention was devoted to Washington Irving. Undergirded by exceptionalism and nationalism, the Puritans‐to‐Revolution master narrative of early American literature, as I will call it, ensured that most literature from this early period was viewed as not worthy of serious study and was acknowledged as significant only insofar as it established the foundations of “America” or prepared the way for the purportedly superior flowering of American literature that followed in the mid‐nineteenth century.
Much has changed in the literary‐historical landscape in recent years, however, and this volume demonstrates perhaps one of the most significant developments in the broader field of American literary study over the last two decades: the extraordinary flourishing, dynamism, and innovation of early American literary studies. Even if one only tracks numbers of pages as an indicator of stature, it speaks volumes, if you will, that in this Companion to American Literature the early American period is given equal weight – a full volume – with the nineteenth century (Vol. II) and with the twentieth through twenty‐first centuries (Vol. III). As a point of contrast, the Cambridge Introduction to American Literature (Bercovitch 1994–2005) devotes just one volume out of eight to the period before 1820.
Newly available intellectual currents provide some explanation of the rapid maturation of the field on display in this volume. The rise of New Historicism in the 1980s, along with the development of cultural studies, invigorated the study of a literature that had always been obviously and unmistakably embedded in its historical and cultural contexts. The growth over several decades of women’s, African American, and Native and Indigenous studies, along with other identity‐based fields of inquiry, demonstrated the vast potential for the recovery of diverse texts and voices and the necessity of reinterpreting familiar ones. The prospering of the field of book history identified vocabulary and methods for examining print and material culture as well as publication and circulation networks. The “transnational turn” of the 2000s provided theoretical and methodological tools for dismantling nationalism as the primary framework through which to read early texts, which were written in periods that preceded nation formation and which were ineluctably transnational and hemispheric in nature and reach. The more recent “religious turn” and its interrogation of secularization narratives long holding sway over understandings of the period have enabled a more nuanced consideration of a fuller range of religious doctrines, expressions, and practices. The wealth of resources made available through digital technologies and the accompanying questions posed by digital humanities have reshaped the early American archive and the critical horizons within which scholars and students work. Finally, the Society of Early Americanists, founded in 1990 by Carla Mulford, Sharon M. Harris, and Rosemary Guruswamy, and its biennial conference created forums and communities within which to generate and disseminate scholarship, along with several journals in the field.
As a result, the field of early American literary study is more expansive, diverse, and complicated than it seemed even two decades ago. The canon of noteworthy figures and texts drastically broadens to include a larger range of people, communicative modes, geographical regions, and temporal moments. While long‐recognized figures, historical events, and genres continue to garner critical attention, the inquiry is carried out through different methodologies and forwards new kinds of questions. This volume is the result of these contexts: a long‐held master narrative of literary history that cracked under the strain of its own inadequacies, the emergence of new and newly energized approaches, and scholars who have revised old ideas and embraced alternative visions. The contributors in this volume trace continuities in the field of early American literary studies as traditionally conceived and pursued since the rise of the university, even as they demonstrate the innovation of the newest theoretical models, approaches, and questions. They examine familiar texts, figures, and events, and they recover works, episodes, and encounters that critics even a few decades ago never knew existed or knew to value. They consistently move beyond boundaries – geographic, linguistic, cultural, social, generic, temporal, and others – and evaluate the ways they impede a full appraisal of the period and its complicated dynamics.
Because the Puritans‐to‐Revolution master narrative has been so influential, it is worth taking some time to review its major claims and highlight the ways it directs inquiry to a specific set of texts written by elite white men that sit at the nexus of religion and politics. The conventional understanding of American literature from its beginnings to 1820 – the view taught in literature classrooms through most of the twentieth century – typically marked the “beginnings” of the tradition as demarcated by English settlement of the eastern seaboard colonies in the early sixteenth century, especially the Protestant separatist settlement of Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Settlers in these two colonies displayed a notable investment in textuality due to the exegetical influence of the Protestant Reformation, the narrative goes, and in their privileging of spiritual examination, didactic sermonizing, and a plain prose style the roots of the American literary tradition can be located. Similarly, traits that came to be considered essentially and exceptionally American in character were traced back to the contradictory impulses demonstrated in early English colonists’ efforts to “civilize” Native peoples while brutally pillaging them of their land and lives, as in the Pequot massacre of 1607 or King Philip’s War of the 1670s; Puritans’ high valuing of community while competitively grasping for resources to increase their individual wealth, measured by the expansion outward from their original settlements; and their seeking of freedom to establish their own religious institutions while demonstrating the opposite of religious toleration in demonizing Native Americans, hanging witches (most notably in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials of 1692) and exiling those with other religious viewpoints, including so‐called heretics, Quakers, and Catholics.
The influence of European Enlightenment ideals, especially rationalism and scientific inquiry, shifted the relentlessly religious tenor of New England’s first century of settlement into more secular pursuits, this familiar literary‐historical narrative continues, though religious thought received renewed impetus in the religious revivalism of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. Distance from England and the economic drain and turmoil of English imperial wars, including the French and Indian Wars of the 1760s; the English Crown’s impositions in the form of taxes on its colonies, especially the stamp tax of 1764, and the killing of civilians in the Boston Massacre of 1770; and the coalescing of a uniquely American colonial identity, all combined with new notions of individualism, equality, and democratic self‐government, to give rise to the American colonial effort to throw off British imperial rule. The premises driving the American Revolutionary War, which began in 1776, crystallized and advanced through debate in the public sphere of print publication and progressed through long years of violent military conflict that ended in 1783. The articulation of republican principles, the formation of a new nation, and the effort to define “What then is the American, this new man?” in the words of John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1782/2013: 31), proceeded through a range of political writings. These concerns were also given fictional treatment in the nation’s earliest novels.
According to this Puritans‐to‐Revolution master narrative of early America’s literary history, the period subsequent to the Revolution produced little to no literary output of note. By 1820 the rudimentary state of American culture had provoked barbs on the international stage, exemplified by Sydney Smith’s (1820) taunt in the highly regarded Edinburgh Review, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” and set the stage for the development of the novel as a popular form in the 1820s and the flourishing of the American Renaissance in the 1830s. Genocide of Indigenous peoples, the expansion of slavery, and the unequal status of women and other marginalized groups may have been given glancing notice in a few writings, but always from a Eurocentric viewpoint and with little sustained attention. Class received little examination except in celebration of the self‐made man, a mythology produced and promulgated in this period, and groups such as Jews, Muslims, or non‐Anglo immigrants or non‐English language speakers were virtually invisible in this influential telling of American literary history.
A volume that takes as its title American Literature, Origins to 1820 may seem to face a daunting struggle to be innovative and iconoclastic in revising that powerful master narrative given the traditionalism of the categories indicated in its title. The title could seem to auger that this volume will present a nationalist reading of a narrow range of writings classified as “literature,” produced by a culturally homogenous group of men, during a defined historical period which was lengthy but most notable for being devoid of cultural sophistication or complexity. Contributors in this volume, however, push against each of the primary terms of the title, and in doing so reveal what is at stake in scholarly investigations of this period and literary studies more generally as they revise this familiar narrative. Each chapter traces traditional understandings of the field in recognition of the fact that students and scholars must understand its history and development in order to engage with it fruitfully today. Familiar topics like Puritanism’s literary culture, Benjamin Franklin’s written oeuvre, and print culture’s role in forwarding the American Revolution each receive dedicated chapters, for example, but their authors – Abram Van Engen, Stephen Carl Arch, and Philip Gould, respectively – show the limitations of old approaches, how new approaches are transforming our traditional understandings of the topics and reorienting our attention to different facets of the texts or culture, and what additional directions remain to be explored. Similarly, Peter Grund reads documents related to the Salem witch trials, typically mined for the historical information they provide, for their potential to sustain literary analysis.
To the extent this volume is organized around the period “Origins to 1820,” it may seem to leave temporality and historicity intact. Yet many contributors employ inventive strategies to think about time, history, and period and in doing so upend the Puritans‐to‐Revolution trajectory of the conventional narrative. They focus attention on a myriad of moments other than Puritan settlement, the Enlightenment and Great Awakening, and the Revolution, for example. Some locate the “beginnings” of this period much earlier than 1620 and in a broader context than English settlement, encompassing sixteenth‐century Spanish and French colonialism. Tamara Harvey’s vision stretches back to Columbus’s journeys and forward to the present in interrogating the role of settlement in various European powers’ incursions into the Americas. Other contributors focus intensively on the first three‐quarters of the eighteenth century, outside of the frameworks of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening, and identify important historical events that need to be added to any timeline of the period. Still other contributors, chief among them Duncan Faherty, uncover the unexpected richness of the virtually unstudied first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Some chapters disrupt history by looking before and beyond the defined historical era, juxtaposing moments in the period with those that preceded it – for example, Cassander Smith’s demonstration of how Portugal’s fifteenth‐century African slave trade creates the preconditions for Africans’ experiences in America – and those that followed it, including Timothy Sweet’s linking of modern environmental concerns with eighteenth‐century preoccupations surrounding nature or Patricia Loughran’s reading of nation formation during the Revolution through the lens of the twenty‐first‐century popular musical Hamilton. Kenneth Roemer profoundly destabilizes chronology altogether by considering oral traditions that predate modernity and are simultaneously in processes of creation today. Even more familiar epochs, such as the Revolutionary War era, look different when considered through a new lens such as disability studies, as in Sari Altschuler’s effort to apply the methodology to works emerging from a historical period predating modern definitions of disability.
The notion of America is perhaps the term most consistently and vigorously interrogated in the volume. Even more so than in Volumes II or III, “America” is a shifting and unstable term – first referring to a continent and an idea and later a nation – during the long historical period under consideration in this volume. Despite the explanatory dominance that nation and nationalism held over the field for decades during the twentieth century, in retrospect it seems obvious that they were never a good fit as conceptual frameworks through which to consider an amorphous entity which geographically exceeded borders that were shifting and changing over time. An expansive signifier indicating a nation, a region, a set of values, and a group of people, “America” as an analytic lens nonetheless has been shown to be insufficient in accounting for the variegated cultural, social, political, material, and human landscapes it attempted to describe. Numerous contributors in the volume turn to non‐Anglophone histories, unsettling the association of America with England and the English language. Hilary Wyss delineates the experiences, languages, rhetorics, and communications of Indigenous communities, for example, and Patrick Erben describes the discourses of migration and exile in French‐, Dutch‐, and German‐language publications. Contributors decenter New England as the originary site of American literature, situating their analyses in the Atlantic Basin, as John Saillant does in his consideration of what he terms “The First Black Atlantic” or in regions that still lie outside of US borders, as in Michael Drexler’s excavation of the long history behind Haiti’s status on the international stage today. Even contributors who primarily explore the relationship between England and its colonies on the northeastern seaboard emphasize the multidirectional exchanges of ideas, goods, and people in larger global and imperial contexts.
“Literature” also endures scrutiny in the volume. The notion of the literary has been interrogated since cultural studies exerted its influence, and the category of literature has been exploded perhaps beyond recognition. In the context of American literary history, the period leading up to 1820 particularly highlights the problems inherent in relying on traditional conceptions of the literary to guide literary‐historical scholarship. Much of this historical era precedes the development of ideas that permeate literary valuation and study in the twentieth century – for example, authorship as indicating a single individual producing original written texts, imbued with creativity and uniqueness, over which they retained ownership rights. Christopher Phillips shows the particular cost of this phenomenon to the status of early American poetry, whose display of collaboration, social engagement, religious inflection, and personal significance have served to render it invisible in critical studies of poetry. Collaborative cultural production of “texts” broadly defined (and which may not be even be alphabetic) is characteristic of the period under consideration in this volume. Genres that preoccupy scholars today in some cases simply did not exist in the seventeenth century – such as the novel or the short story – and genres that were meaningful to those living in this period – commonplace books, for example, or wampum belts – lack interpretive frameworks and therefore often present challenges to today’s scholars. Susan Stabile’s material cultural approach to the circulation of poetry models these possibilities.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume showcase a range of cultural and historical approaches to literary study in order to forward an inclusive, comprehensive, and historically accurate study of American literature. Contributors not only catalogue traditional approaches to the field but also forward concerns that are developing fields of inquiry right now and, insofar as we can anticipate, trends in the years to come. They particularly dwell on the social, political, geographic, material, and technological contexts in which American literature has been defined, produced, circulated, and read. Phillip Round’s chapter shows how an expansive approach to these contexts pays rewards in complicating understandings of the period’s print culture. Looking beyond print publication in a period and geographic space where print culture was nascent, a range of chapters work together to build a new narrative of literary history paying due attention to orality, non‐alphabetic forms of communication and literacy, rhetorics, performance, embodiment, materiality, intertexuality, and manuscript creation and circulation. When contributors discuss print culture they take note of anonymity, seriality, new media contexts, and developing networks related to the print trade, as in Wendy Roberts’s excavation of the pervasive and powerful evangelical print culture of the eighteenth century.
The table of contents for the volume shows attention to traditional loci of study during this period, even as the chapters open up new angles on seemingly familiar topics. The chapter on Charles Brockden Brown, co‐written by Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro, for example, looks beyond Brown’s well‐known status as a novelist to recover the wider and less familiar range of his literary work. At the same time, other figures move to the fore in several chapters to demonstrate their importance in this newly developing literary landscape: Olaudah Equiano, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Samson Occom, Susanna Rowson, and Phillis Wheatley are each given substantive discussion in multiple chapters.
Numerous chapters pay special attention to the concept of genre, including, of course, the perennial literary‐critical favorite, novels. But many chapters look beyond the novel, which was, after all, an emergent form that came into its own relatively late in the historical trajectory of the volume, to other significant forms. Captivity narratives receive two treatments, one by Andrew Newman focusing on their early, religiously based, intercultural instantiation in mediating relations between Native peoples and European settlers, and one by Jodi Schorb which broadens the category to consider Barbary, seduction, and prison narratives in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Jennifer Desiderio refines the distinctions between autobiographies and diaries, while Susan Imbarrato surveys travel writings, a ubiquitous genre in a mobile and expanding nation. Other chapters push back against the notion of genre as a classification system altogether, shifting from considering genre as a stable and delimited category of writing to seeing it as a cultural practice that exceeds modern formulations or binaries placed upon it. Chapters focus instead on communicative practices that resist categorization or on the relation between literary genres and the cultural practices that shape them. Examples include Eve Tavor Bannet’s exploration of the interrelationships between the cultural practice of letter writing and the imaginative world of epistolary novels and Laura Mielke’s demonstration of how early American drama is informed by non‐theatrical performance cultures such as slave auctions or Native ceremonies.
Other chapters use newer methodological approaches to engage the period, including environmentalism, material culture studies, and disability studies. Ivy Schweitzer uses approaches developed in the field of gender and sexuality studies to survey sex and gender broadly in early American literary studies before focusing on seduction novels, while Elizabeth Hewitt employs new economic studies to examine how early American novels narrate economic exchange. Several chapters focus on recovering the experiences and writings of people formerly marginalized or erased in literary histories, especially African Americans and Native American cultural producers during the period, as well those of other European non‐English speakers and writers. No one essay treats women writers as its specific purview. Instead contributors incorporate women’s cultural output into nearly every essay in order to demonstrate women’s significance to and centrality in the field, or they describe gaps in the archive or social prohibitions limiting women’s contributions in that area. Contributors similarly address the contributions of African Americans and Native Americans in every pertinent essay; likewise there is no one single essay on transnational approaches. The thoroughgoing adoption of transnational approaches within the field over the last decade is demonstrated here by the fact that nearly every essay in the volume manifests the field’s imperative to consider early American literature in its transnational, global, hemispheric, and Atlantic contexts.
Myths and monoliths of the Puritans‐to‐Revolution master narrative receive scrutiny throughout the essays. Contributors grapple with the legacy of myths of America and Americanness (especially American exceptionalism) and the role of religion in influencing literature. In addressing the latter, contributors strive for a more nuanced portrayal of the relationships between and among various religious traditions, the influences religions exerted on each other, and how religious beliefs and practices intersected with print culture and aesthetic considerations. Sandra Gustafson, for example, constellates evidence from a range of religious traditions to come to a fuller portrait of religious practices in early America. Contributors move beyond the constraints imposed by conceptions of nation, border, or language by centering intercultural contacts, regionalism that exceeds or exists within borders or nations, translation, and cosmopolitanism. Chiara Cillerai’s examination of the global circulation of Enlightenment discourses of natural science models such an approach. The chapters tell tales of imperialism, colonialism, settlement, and expansion that do not lead inexorably to a celebration of manifest destiny but register histories of forced labor and enslavement; explore colonial subjectivities shaped by the experiences of exile, displacement, alienation, subjugation, and violence; and attend to the voices of individuals and groups formerly marginalized in or excluded entirely from literary history. Kelly Wisecup’s chapter, for example, provides a model of how centering Indigenous perspectives in narratives of colonial encounter provokes a dramatic reinterpretation.
Buttressing all of the considerations contained in this volume is the archival recovery project that has made these explorations of the period possible. The ongoing effort to locate, identify, contextualize, and interpret a broader and deeper range of sources – manuscript and print, English and in other languages, textual and material, non‐alphabetic and sensory, human‐created and natural – has shaped the new insights driving much of the scholarship herein and has the potential to influence the field in directions it is hard to imagine and impossible to foresee. Indeed, over the several years the volume took shape, there are indications of emergent trends in scholarship that will enrich, complicate, and perhaps transform the field anew. These include, among others, affect studies, aesthetics, object studies, modes of reading, and attention to understudied regions during this period such as the Pacific and the Arctic. The potential of digital humanities and big data analytics to increase access to texts, reveal new knowledge, and generate new interpretations will need to be measured and interrogated. In the years this volume is read and studied, more that is new will undoubtedly reveal itself, testifying to the vibrancy and dynamism of the field of early American literature. Phillis Wheatley reminded students at Harvard University in 1773 that a central component of their task as fledgling scholars, an institutional status denied to her as a slave, was to “mark the systems of revolving worlds.” “Revolving” here has two layers of meaning, referring to movement around a circuit, as in the Enlightenment study of astronomy, but also to the act of cogitation itself, or the turning over of ideas. In the injunction to scholars “to mark the systems of revolving worlds” Wheatley thus presciently gives us a phrase that aptly describes the work this volume seeks to accomplish, documenting systemic ways of thinking about early American literature and demonstrating the revolutions in the field of study through cutting‐edge inquiry.
Acknowledgments
Much gratitude to Adam Nemmers and Kassia Waggoner for their painstaking and dedicated work on this volume as editorial assistants. I appreciate the support for the project I received from the Texas Christian University English Department and retired Associate Provost and Dean of University Programs Bonnie Melhart. Thanks also to Samantha Allen Wright and Angelica Hernandez for assisting with tasks at crucial moments and to Faith Barrett, Desirée Henderson, Jennifer Putzi, and Alexandra Socarides for feedback on the introduction.
References
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