Book Review

Despite recent scholarship that seeks to decenter New England in considerations of early American literature, the region continues to fascinate us because it comprises a coherent discourse we can analyze in detail. Moreover, the sheer volume of New England's writing provides grist for different scholarly mills. James D. Hartman's interests, for example, lie more in literary history traditionally conceived, while Jim Egan's are more critically à la mode. Together the books indicate the undeniable vitality of American Puritan writing, even if we question whether it is the sacred spring for literary expression in what became the United States of America.	1
Hartman explores the relationship of early American "providence" tales (which explain the miraculous ways of God to men)—specifically, those concerning witchcraft and Indian captivity—to the development of early American fiction. As he admits, this is hardly virgin ground, for works both by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse and by Michael McKeon, among others, are provocatively about the relationship of the Indian captivity narrative to the emergence of the English novel. But Hartman inflects the subject differently, investigating how in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries American providence tales evolved in novel ways. Clergy such as Increase and Cotton Mather, for example, felt pressure from those who questioned the veracity of their accounts of witchcraft, and thus they placed on their treatises an overlay of the rational or scientific that originated in the discourse of the new experimental science. The resultant narratives still described the wonders of the invisible world but in a way that gave skeptics a handhold in the real world. The result, the author implies, was a merger of the "actual" and the "imaginary" that anticipates Nathaniel Hawthorne's definition of the "romance" as a prose style.	2
But some historians of the American novel trace a different genealogy, through socalled sentimental writers such as Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other women. Thus, Hartman also shows how authors of providence tales prepared the way for such writing by the inclusion of ever more scenes of violence, sentiment, and melodrama of the sort that David D. Hall and others have identified as the staple of the burgeoning print culture of the period. Thus, by the turn of the eighteenth century, authors of providence tales were responding not only to developments in the world of empirical science but also to popular culture. As a result, Hartman concludes, "writers could now represent the theories, subjects, and accounts of seventeenth-century theological debates, scientific research, and voyages of discovery in entertaining prose relations" that anticipated the novel.	3
Hartman contributes a detailed genealogy of the providence tale in England, summarizes what we know of witchcraft "relations" in England and Europe as well as in New England, and reprises recent work on Indian captivity narratives. Those seeking to understand the origins of Anglo-American fiction will have to consider how the rational and the sensational were conjoined in the phenomenally popular captivity narratives, even if they resist the notion that such writers as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville "owe" something to this earlier writing. In any event, all who value accuracy in scholarship, or expect it in editing, will wonder why, for example, in his text Hartman has Sir Walter Scott's Peveril of the Peak published in 1847, and in his bibliography in 1857, particularly since the book appeared in 1823. Or question why he places R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam in 1965, not 1955. Or why Karen Kupperman's book Settling with the Indians is erroneously titled. We deserve better.	. . .