| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861. By Etsuko Taketani. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. x, 236 pp. $30.00, ISBN 1-57233-227-1.)

Literary scholars, students of postcolonial history, and women's historians may be the obvious audiences for this book, but it deserves the close attention of antebellum American historians generally. Etsuko Taketani's purpose seems simple enough: "to examine the ways in which U.S. women writers ... generated, circulated, and questioned colonialism between 1825 and 1861" (p. 4). On one level, this is merely an extension of the familiar project of documenting the contradictions internal to domesticity as an expression of American nationalism. But Taketani makes at least two important contributions to this work. First, by choosing texts that have been largely ignored—including schoolbooks, children's literature, and minor works of poetry and fiction—she adds enormously to our sense of the range and complexity of women's domestic literature. More important, by focusing her attention specifically on colonial discourse, she is able both to complicate our understanding of the cultural work of domestic literature and to contribute provocatively to the ongoing reassessment of Manifest Destiny as a useful category for analyzing American imperialism.

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