EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE最新文献

{"title":"Biblia Americana, vol. 10: Hebrews–Revelation by Cotton Mather (review)","authors":"Christopher Trigg","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918930","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Biblia Americana, vol. 10: Hebrews–Revelation</em> by Cotton Mather <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher Trigg (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Biblia Americana, <span>vol. 10:</span> Hebrews–Revelation</em><br/> <small>cotton mather</small>, <small>edited by</small> <small>jan stievermann</small><br/> Mohr Siebeck, 2023<br/> 1102 pp. <p>\"<em>I will also ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you</em>;—The <em>Bodies</em> of the <em>Raised</em>, shall they be furnished with <em>Teeth</em>, or no?\"—Cotton Mather poses this rhetorical question at almost the very end of his massive <em>Biblia Americana</em> manuscript, in a \"Coronis\" or coda to the last of thirteen thematic essays appended to its complete Bible commentary (963). Although the dentition of resurrected saints was exactly the kind of technical eschatological detail that absorbed Mather, his inquiry here reflects his exasperation at those who maintained that the apocalyptic scriptures were mired in \"<em>Obscurity</em> and <em>Ambiguity</em>\" (963). He conceded <strong>[End Page 231]</strong> that there were still many mysteries about the eschaton that were yet to be resolved. But after laboring on the <em>Biblia</em> for over half his life, he was convinced that it contained more than enough proof of the reality and imminence of Christ's millennial kingdom on earth.</p> <p>The volume under review is the sixth to be published in the <em>Biblia Americana</em> series, under the direction of Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann (also the editor of this volume). Although it also contains his commentaries on Hebrews, James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and Jude, Mather's commentary on Revelation is its centerpiece, running to 354 pages, including a \"Postscript\" and its own \"Coronis.\" As Stievermann's impeccable introduction demonstrates, Mather's literalist interpretation of some of Revelation's key prophecies was the cornerstone of the entire <em>Biblia</em> project because it defined his understanding of the history of exegesis. Early Christians, Mather insisted, shared his belief that the \"First Resurrection\" mentioned in Revelation 20:5–6 described the return to corporeal life of all the elect dead at the beginning of the millennium, ahead of their rule over the sanctified New Earth (718–19). Catholicism then \"condemned [the doctrine] for <em>Hæresy</em>\"—an indication that the Roman church was the Antichrist (718). Following the Reformation, the \"Truth began to Revive\" (765). However, there were still those Protestants (including his own grandfather John Cotton) who, \"with a <em>wonderful Absurdity</em>,\" read the First Resurrection metaphorically, as \"a Work of <em>Sanctification</em> upon the Soul\" (717), or else (with Hugo Grotius and Richard Baxter) held that the millennial prophecies had been fulfilled spiritually in the","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper ed. by Stephen Carl Arch and Keat Murray (review)","authors":"Theresa Strouth Gaul","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918918","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper</em> ed. by Stephen Carl Arch and Keat Murray <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Theresa Strouth Gaul (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper</em><br/> <small>edited by</small> <small>stephen carl arch</small> and <small>keat murray</small><br/> Modern Language Association of America, 2022<br/> 220 pp. <p>Teaching James Fenimore Cooper's novels in an undergraduate classroom today is daunting, and we know the reasons why: convoluted plots, unfamiliar historical contexts, archaic and circuitous language, lengthy narratives, and racial and gender politics ranging from ambiguous to problematic to offensive from our current point of view. The contributors to <em>Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper</em>, edited by Stephen Carl Arch and Keat Murray, are realistic about the challenges of teaching Cooper but remain undaunted. Together, they seek \"to empower students to engage the ideas\" at the center of his novels while demonstrating Cooper's relevance today in a number of contemporary debates, including \"the nature of democracy, the rights of marginalized peoples, and our relation to the natural world\" (1).</p> <p>The volume primarily targets instructors of upper-level courses for English majors, though a few essays address approaches suitable for graduate courses (Rochelle Raineri Zuck), general education offerings (Elaina Anne Frulla and David W. Hartwig), or international students (Anna Scannavini). An online survey of instructors who frequently teach Cooper's novels helped the editors determine an array of resources with which to open the book. These extremely helpful materials include an introduction outlining the ups and downs of Cooper's career and reception, a comprehensive and chronological list of Cooper's publications, a literature review of selected significant critical readings, commentary on the appropriateness for teaching of available editions, and a list of all the film adaptations of Cooper's works accompanied by overviews of the most significant ones. The editors <strong>[End Page 179]</strong> organized essays into sections on history and culture, the environment, language and form, and visuality and cinema. Altogether, essays in the book provide approaches to teaching eleven of Cooper's novels: the Leather-stocking Tales (1823–41), <em>The Crater</em> (1847), <em>The Pilot</em> (1824), <em>Lionel Lincoln</em> (1825), <em>Satanstoe</em> (1845), <em>The Spy</em> (1821), <em>The Ways of the Hour</em> (1850), and <em>Wyandotté</em> (1843). As one might expect, <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em> (1826) receives the most attention as the focus of six of the seventeen essays.</p> <p>The most exciting essays in the book are those that offer fresh approaches to teaching Cooper","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"132 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi (review)","authors":"Wendy Raphael Roberts","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918922","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry</em> by Jennifer Putzi <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Wendy Raphael Roberts (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry</em><br/> <small>jennifer putzi</small><br/> University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021<br/> 272 pp. <p>Jennifer Putzi's <em>Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry</em> expertly engages the composition, publication, and circulation of women's printed poetry to produce a far-reaching theory and methodology of relational poetics as radical recovery. Moving with graceful nimbleness between this overarching framework and a precision born of copious archival work, Putzi offers a compelling narrative of women's engagement with print and its various networks and relations—a story unknown in part because studies of nineteenth-century women's authorship have primarily focused on prose and in part because of a scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality. Putzi's account of what she calls \"unremarkable poetry\"—that which aims at imitation rather than invention—produced by women poets in their particular gendered, classed, and <strong>[End Page 196]</strong> raced negotiations with authorship is a remarkable contribution to the study of American poetry.</p> <p>Putzi joins a company of scholars such as Claudia Stokes, William Huntting Howell, Ezra Tawil, Alexandra Socarides, Kerry Larson, Eliza Richards, and Colin Wells who add to our understanding of nineteenth-century poetic culture as one that was deeply invested in imitation. She builds on the transformative work done by book history scholars, including Michael Winship, Meredith McGill, and Leon Jackson, as well as Virginia Jackson's theory that the lyric sublimates social mediations, to construct her concept of \"relational poetics\" (12). Relational poetics is first a theory that shaped antebellum women poets and second a scholarly methodology Putzi employs that arises from this archive. At its core it emphasizes \"imitation, community, and collaboration … in poems themselves, in the avenues women poets take to gain access to print, and in the way their poems function within a variety of print cultural contexts\" (1). Putzi turns from the figure of the nineteenth-century woman poet to the real labor of women poets within particular communities and then, taking her cues from the poems themselves, nimbly demonstrates how to read such poems as negotiations with various encumberments to authorship, print, and audience engagement.</p> <p><em>Fair Copy</em> begins with the ubiquitous poet, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, to establish the prevalence of relational poetics and then moves to four less read poets and poetic communities as test cases \"to demonstrate the radical potential of this reframing of th","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toni Morrison's A Mercy: A Meditation on Othering","authors":"Dana A. Williams","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918908","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Toni Morrison's <em>A Mercy</em><span>A Meditation on Othering</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dana A. Williams (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Toni Morrison has famously noted that her novels always begin with a question. In <em>The Bluest Eye</em> the question is <em>How do we make sense of a young Black girl's longing for blue eyes at a moment when chants of \"Black is beautiful\" abound?</em> In <em>Paradise</em> she asks, <em>What happens when you strip away racial markers?—what's left of the story?</em> In <em>Love</em>, we are prompted to wonder, <em>What are the unintended consequences of integration?</em> In <em>A Mercy</em>, the question is about place: <em>What can we know about a place before the people who populated it were racialized?</em></p> <p>In each instance, race/racism/racialization undergird the inquiry.<sup>1</sup> That the relationship between literature and race is of especial significance to Morrison is evidenced throughout her fiction, in interviews, and, perhaps most aggressively, in her collection of essays and lectures <em>Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination</em>, the first extended exploration of the question of race and literature (and literature's language) she offers us publicly. There she writes: \"When does racial 'unconsciousness' or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail?\" (Morrison, <em>Playing</em> xii). The queries here are meant to direct our attention to the ways American literature written by white authors often uses constructs of Blackness (characters, sounds, cultures, symbols, and the like) as narrative gearshifts—critical moments of discovery or change. This line of inquiry then leads to an interrogation of the ways the literary enterprise is or is not altruistic as a humanistic enterprise. \"When, in a race-conscious culture,\" Morrison writes, \"is that lofty goal actually approximated? When not and why?\" (xiii). Her recognition of the fact that so much of early American literature reflected a worldview that linked individual freedom to racial oppression was also a recognition of the limits of this literature. <strong>[End Page 101]</strong> What would happen if a writer rejected this singular landscape and pursued one absent \"the pressure that racialized societies level on the creative process\" (xiii)? In its determination to commingle history and fiction to re-create the North American landscape before racism is codified, <em>A Mercy</em> takes up this challenge.<sup>2</sup></p> <p>Morrison's interest in the relation of race and literature and the ways racism compromises literature's potential to enact humanism has a long history. Years before publishing <em>Playing in the Dark</em>","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"148 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching A Mercy","authors":"Riché Richardson","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918909","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Teaching <em>A Mercy</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Riché Richardson (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison was truly royalty to me, and over the years, in my roles as a teacher, scholar and artist, I have treasured every opportunity to reflect on her. In 2005, I first introduced a seminar on her body of novels titled Toni Morrison's Novels on my former campus, the University of California, Davis. In recent times, I have reflected on the opportunities that I've had in my career to teach her work in a range of contexts. For example, in 2019, in the wake of her passing, I discussed my pedagogical process and experience in an op-ed in the <em>Cornell Daily Sun</em>, and as part of a teach-in honoring the fiftieth anniversary of <em>The Bluest Eye</em>, I discussed the novel in a teach-in at Cornell, her alma mater as a 1955 MA in English.<sup>1</sup> Similarly, in April 2022 I served as the invited speaker for the cohort of graduate instructors in Literature Humanities at Columbia University and modeled approaches and ideas for teaching <em>Song of Solomon</em> as they prepared to teach it to undergraduate students in their courses on campus as the selected literary work for the year within its core curriculum.<sup>2</sup></p> <p>I'm thankful to be part of this discussion of teaching strategies for <em>A Mercy</em>. Along with students from my Toni Morrison seminar at the Bread-loaf School of English, I first heard Morrison read from the novel, on the path to its publication, in 2008 at the Toni Morrison Society's Biennial Conference at the College of Charleston. I heard her read from the novel again at Cornell the next year. My method for teaching with Morrison has sometimes related her writings on the past to issues in the present as a way to reflect on her critical epistemology on race and nation, which points to the value in studying early American history.</p> <p>In my African American Short Story course, a writing seminar for first-year students at Cornell that I've taught regularly since 2010, \"The Lynching of Jube Benson\" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the acclaimed Black poet who famously lamented the limitations of writing \"a jingle in a broken tongue,\" has been among works we've read. The story focuses on Dr. Melville's <strong>[End Page 113]</strong> regretful memory of participating in the lynching of the Black man invoked in the title, who readers discover later in the story is innocent of attacking and killing a young white woman. A key expository passage reflects on the doctor's view of Blackness, which had fueled his suspicions and fateful choices:</p> <blockquote> <p>I saw his black face glooming there in the half light, and I could only think of him as a monster. It's tradition. At first I was told that the black man would catch me, and when I got over that, they taught me that the devil was black, a","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"313 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885 by Georgia Brady Barnhill (review)","authors":"Amy L. Sopcak-Joseph","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918926","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885</em> by Georgia Brady Barnhill <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Amy L. Sopcak-Joseph (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885</em><br/> <small>georgia brady barnhill</small><br/> University of Massachusetts Press, 2021<br/> 332 pp. <p>In his memoir <em>Recollections of a Lifetime</em> (1856), author and editor Samuel Griswold Goodrich reflected on how nineteenth-century literary annuals brought more than reading material into American homes: \"These charming works scattered the very gems of art far and wide, making the reading mass familiar with the finest specimens of engravings, and not only cultivating an appetite for this species of luxury, but in fact exulting the general standard of taste all over the civilized world\" (75). Georgia Brady Barnhill's <em>Gems of Art on Paper</em> sketches the longer history of how illustration techniques developed and merged with literary publishing <strong>[End Page 215]</strong> from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth. As Goodrich indicated, this is not just a story of adding pictures for the sake of breaking up long blocks of type; rather, these \"gems\" made the careers of artists and increasingly brought art into middle-class American parlors.</p> <p>Barnhill's study covers a veritable \"age of revolutions\" in publishing and artistic production made possible by tools like lithographic stones, grease pencils, woodblocks, and chemical washes. Her project begins in the late eighteenth century when readers' access to images was limited. The chapbooks, almanacs, and newspapers that made up the reading material of many Americans contained small images made from woodcuts. Barnhill's focus is on literary publications, but even those contained few images by the 1780s. Americans with greater means purchased illustrated books from England or sometimes domestically published books with carefully engraved reproductions of art. Throughout the nineteenth century, a number of conditions changed: innovators developed new techniques to reproduce images, publishers looked to provide a growing audience of middle-class consumers with illustrated literature, and an increasing number of skilled American artists took up the work. By the time Goodrich penned his reflections, consumers found images to be cheaper and more plentiful. This scholarship is \"long overdue,\" writes Barnhill, because until recently \"scholarly interest in historical literary illustration was minimal\" (2). Both historians of the book and of literature have largely bypassed the subject; even Gerard Genette set aside illustrations in <em>Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation</em> (Cambridge UP, 1997) because the subject is so vast.</p> <p>The thing is, nineteenth-cent","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)","authors":"Michael Boyden","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918913","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World</em> by Katherine Johnston <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael Boyden (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World</em><br/> <small>katherine johnston</small><br/> Oxford University Press, 2022<br/> 264 pp. <p>This meticulously researched book draws on a wealth of archival materials spanning three centuries to cast a fresh eye on the history of African slavery in the English Caribbean and the American South. As Johnston convincingly documents, the persistent idea that Africans were more tolerant of the heat and therefore more suited to labor in tropical conditions did not emerge out of the lived reality on the plantations. Rather, it was a deliberate and strategic fabrication on the part of the planter class to convince legislators, investors, and colonial officials that African slavery was indispensable—indeed, natural—to the plantation economy. Since ancient assumptions about the deleterious effects of hot climates disposed the European public sphere to consider the tropics as a dangerous and unhealthy place for whites, this \"climate rhetoric\"—as Johnston calls it—was highly effective in swaying public opinion in favor of racialized slave labor. What was initially a strategic move on the part of the slaveholders eventually hardened into an unshakable belief in the impossibility of white labor in the tropics, the legacy of which continues to be felt to the present day.</p> <p>Johnston tells the history of this transformation over six tightly organized chapters. The first sketches out the conditions that gave rise to plantation slavery in the Greater Caribbean during the seventeenth century. Contrary to what historians have long assumed, the colonists' actual experiences with the tropical climate were not a decisive factor in the shift toward African slave labor. Indeed, early explorers, settlers, and physicians did not observe marked differences in the way whites and Blacks responded <strong>[End Page 149]</strong> to the new environment. The shift to Black slave labor was due to a shortage of white indentured servants after the English Civil War, in combination with the consolidation of plantations into larger estates, which limited postindenture prospects for white laborers. The idea that Black peoples were better suited to work in the Caribbean climate was invented to naturalize a system that emerged out of economic pressures given the lack of white laborers. As Johnston indicates, the climatic rhetoric was reinforced by two mediatized events during the latter half of the century that further damaged the reputation of the Caribbean colonies in Britain, namely the Western Design of 1655, a failed attempt to wrest Hispaniola from Spanish control, an","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)","authors":"Ian Finseth","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918917","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability</em> by Abby L. Goode <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ian Finseth (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability</em><br/> <small>abby l. goode</small><br/> University of North Carolina Press, 2022<br/> 276 pp. <p>The animating impulse of this important, well-executed study is a desire to challenge both \"the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing\" (2) and a scholarly \"tendency to engage with the nation's eugenic and agrarian histories separately\" (5). The ideals of self-reliant agricultural life and of a sustainable approach to natural resources, as twinned and potent forms of cultural discourse, turn out, in Goode's account, to be poisoned at the root. From Thomas Jefferson's encomiums to the \"cultivators of the earth\" all the way to the twenty-first century, they have been poisoned by fear—fear of overpopulation, of miscegenation, of the racial other, of moral pollution, of rampant fertility, of \"real Americans\" getting squeezed out of their rightful place. There was never some golden age of agrarian sustainability, nor even a belief in such a golden age, but rather images of disorder, degeneration, and corruption that motivated different ways of conceiving of—or fantasizing about—orderly, harmonious, and productive places and futures. These \"agrotopias,\" Goode writes, \"exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline,\" and they \"constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of 'New World' abundance\" (3).</p> <p>The central theoretical premise of <em>Agrotopias</em> is that sustainability rhetoric and the agrarian myth \"cannot be disentangled\" (16) from the United States' long, violent history of racism, nativism, reproductive control, and eugenics. What results is a highly effective analysis of the ways in which <strong>[End Page 174]</strong> images of the good life—a healthy relationship of the human to the environmental—are shadowed by and vitiated by a desire for racial homogeneity. Along the way, famously progressive figures, including Walt Whitman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are subject to sharp, occasionally devastating, critique. Even Michelle Obama's White House garden, in the epilogue, is implicated in the problematic legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the book can feel repetitive in places, that repetitiveness actually comes to seem formally appropriate to the endless reinscriptions of the ideological problem Goode investigates. After reading the book, one might well ask whether there is <em>any</em> kind of environmental discourse that is not fatally compromised by the racial and reproductive legacies of the past.</p> <p>One might also ask, however, <em>why</em> we cannot disentangle these ideological strands from on","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"97 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Possibility and A Mercy","authors":"Michelle S. Hite","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918911","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Possibility and <em>A Mercy</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michelle S. Hite (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Toni Morrison's novel <em>A Mercy</em> (2008) appeared in the marketplace within the context of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election. Given this context, interviewers were interested in the novel's preracial context as directly tied to the suggestion of the postracial world order used to shape conversations following Obama's election. Specifically, they wanted to know from Morrison how much the possibilities of Obama's postracial era recalled or could recall the preracial antecedent one that Morrison claims for <em>A Mercy</em>. Ignored in this inquiry, however, was the basic fact that conceptualizations of the postracial itself depended on the vocabulary and ecology of race and its attendant structures of meaning, which constrains possibilities for imagining the very new world order being suggested. To understand this critique, one of Morrison's famous passages on race, this one delivered to her 1975 Portland State audience, may be helpful:</p> <blockquote> <p>The function, the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. … Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdom, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.</p> (\"Portland State\" 35:55) </blockquote> <p>Distraction can easily be regarded as constitutive of race for Morrison, since she contends that greed explains its invention more than a belief in the inherent inferiority or inhumanity of Black people (\"Portland State\" 33:48). <em>A Mercy</em> suggests that moving beyond the racial hierarchy requires turning toward the nation's prehistory and so before possibilities for expressions of human personhood were reduced to racial inevitabilities.</p> <p>In an interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison offers that in <em>A Mercy</em>, she reached the heights—that in \"some respects she's never been better\" as a novelist (\"Interview\" 1:40). The research into the landscape and the laws <strong>[End Page 129]</strong> that enabled her to realize the integrity of the characters' voices yielded this declaration. In addition to accepting Rose's suggestion that <em>A Mercy</em> serves as a \"prequel to <em>Beloved</em>\" (2:58), Morrison also describes it as \"preracial\" in that it occurs \"before it all got institutionalized; when everybody was for sale and for rent … whites, mixed, everything. And slavery itself was this universal thing; and there was no nation, no empire that did not rest on it whether it was Egypt, or Athens, or Moscow\" (3:09, 3:15) In responding to Rose's claim that, like <em>","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)","authors":"Jeannine Marie Delombard","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918915","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em> by Zachary McLeod Hutchins <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jeannine Marie Delombard (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em><br/> <small>zachary mcleod hutchins</small><br/> University of North Carolina Press, 2022<br/> 306 pp. <p><em>Before Equiano</em>'s subtitle suggests that this new monograph offers a study of the texts and circumstances that yielded the genre known as the slave narrative, one of whose conventional starting points is <em>The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusatvus Vassa, the African</em> (1789). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that <em>Before Equiano</em> is more revisionist history than \"prehistory.\" In the introduction, Hutchins asserts that \"because eighteenth-century newspapers were the source of the period's most numerous and popular materials on slavery and because their language and ideas shaped the first book-length, stand-alone auto/biographies of enslaved Africans, they should be read as slave narratives\" (21). The claim is not simply that representations of slavery in the early American periodical press \"shaped\" the emergent genre but that \"eighteenth-century newspapers\" <em>themselves</em> \"should be read as slave narratives\" (21). As it turns out, the methodological intervention centers not on the newspapers so much as <strong>[End Page 158]</strong> how we read them. Calling on today's literary critics to adopt the \"imaginative\" reading that he attributes to eighteenth-century newspaper audiences, Hutchins proposes to redefine the slave narrative itself (7).</p> <p>From Dorothy Porter and Marian Wilson Starling in the 1930s and 1940s, to Frances Smith Foster, John Blassingame, and William Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of the slave narrative traced the genre's origins to ephemeral and often firsthand accounts of the lives of enslaved individuals in colonial newspapers, letters, broadsides, and pamphlets. Hutchins, by contrast, is interested in a much broader aggregate of \"materials on slavery\" (21)—advertisements for fugitives from slavery and accounts of trials or insurrections involving enslaved people, but also, crucially, foreign dispatches treating enslavement as a common wartime practice. Hutchins locates the beginnings of the genre in the minds of \"imaginative readers\" who \"might be said to have mentally authored the first slave narratives as they consumed brief newspaper reports of enslaved individuals\" (7). In this way, he maintains, \"slave narratives were read by both black and white readers, long before they were bound and sold—even before they were written\" (7). Moreover, because bondage was \"a condition rhetorically and philosophically associated with war,\" he contends, these \"stories of slavery w","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139766496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}