Reviewed by James O'Neil Spady | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by James O'Neil Spady | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

James O'Neil Spady, Soka University of America

New World, Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing. By David Read. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. 189 pages. $37.50 (cloth).
Historian Nicholas Thomas once cautioned that despite the importance of interdisciplinarity to colonial studies "it remains important to argue about the effectiveness of different disciplinary technologies."¹ In this short book, which offers close readings of the works of John Smith, William Bradford, Thomas Morton, and Roger Williams to argue for the unsystematic nature of colonialism and its detachment from the confusing challenges of colonization, David Read defends literary criticism as a discipline. It "adds to, but cannot be replaced by," he argues, "the knowledge gained from using the tools of history, anthropology, political science, economics or any other discipline" (15).	1
Read charges postcolonial studies with flattening literary criticism through concepts such as "discursive fields" and the "death of the author."² He wants to resuscitate the author. Insisting that historical literary studies should acknowledge "some very basic forms of human agency" (9), he emphasizes that the works of Smith, Bradford, Morton, and Williams were the efforts of individuals who attempted to shape a North American world of unknowns into texts intelligible to Europeans. These men recognized "the authority and familiarity—the dignitas—of poetic or dramatic genres" (3) as well as rhetorical tropes. They recognized the practical use of these familiar genres and tropes as mechanisms for making a new world more readily knowable and consciously mixed genres of inventory, history, poetry, and dialogue, thereby "shap[ing]" their books into what Read labels "knowledge projects" (3), or efforts to produce intelligible knowledge from a flood of information coming out of the New World. Instead of a confident and penetrating gaze on the colonized, their writing usually encoded frustration, wonderment, confusion, and ambivalence.	2
In Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1620–47), critics have often seen a coherent, providential narrative. Read persuasively shows that this coherence is limited to the first book, whereas the second book is more secular. The history is ambivalent and rambling, reflecting the challenging setting of early New England and Bradford's conflicted and incomplete memory as well as his frustrated effort to put it all in order. Read attempts to split "the difference" (20) between Peter Hulme's approach to reading the unreliability of texts such as Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) and Myra Jehlen, who finds Hulme's method too confidently locates and cracks hidden codes in these texts, resulting in "an equal and opposite radical certainty" (19).³ Thus Read finds that incoherence itself is a historical phenomenon, susceptible to analysis. That the Generall Historie contradicts itself and Smith seems unable to settle on a single narrative voice is indicative of the idea that "texts ... resist assimilation into 'discourse' as often as not" (22). According to Read scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt failed to see that the ambivalence and unreliability in colonial texts about even basic events reveal how "confusion reigns" (36) in colonial writing. The extent of that confusion calls into question the understanding of seventeenth-century colonialism as a systematic ideology and coordinated policy.	3
Read suggests that in emphasizing confusion and ambivalence he is bucking the trend within literary criticism of colonial writing. Yet early Americanists may recognize his general argument because it participates in established lines of interpretation that identify what Frederick Cooper has described as "conjunctures where power relations [are] most vulnerable" and the "limits of power beneath the claims to dominance."⁴ And ethnohistorians such as James Axtell, Colin G. Calloway, Theda Perdue, Daniel K. Richter, Neal Salisbury (whom Read cites), Nancy Shoemaker, and Richard White have long emphasized the creative compromises and adaptations by both colonizers and the colonized.	. . .

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