Reviews of Books

Colonial Writing and the New World joins a growing body of work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing that views colonial identity as less univocal and homogeneous than sometimes implied by studies of encounters between Europeans and Native Americans. Thomas Scanlan's revisionism is tied to the larger end of challenging teleological notions of United States identity that discern the future nation's putative "beginning" in colonial texts, and his historicist project is to recover the local contexts of such writing. Through an astute combination of close reading and contextual knowledge, Scanlan argues that colonial writing was often also involved in the project of articulating a Protestant identity for England.	1
The book's subtitle, Allegories of Desire, indicates its main critical tool: a flexible notion of allegory deployed to highlight the nonliteral meanings of texts. To explore "allegory" and "context" together is uncommon in literary scholarship, but Scanlan convincingly associates them through his careful attention to assumed readerships. His use of allegory is justified by the allegorizing bent of the Protestant tradition, although the texts discussed are not explicit allegories so much as texts that, "by virtue of their implicitly asserted connection to a context shared by their readers, demand of their readers an act of allegorical interpretation" (p. 13).	2
Jean de Léry's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578), though tangential to debates about English national culture, offers a good example of a Protestant text that, by constantly invoking the contemporary French religious wars, demands that its readers reflect back on their own national situation while reading of events in a distant overseas colony. As Scanlan points out, the allegorizing it required was complex: Léry's Protestant read-ers would need to switch between identifying with the native Brazilians as fellow victims of Catholic predation and demonizing them as unconscious adherents of Roman Catholicism. A similar ambivalence marks the attitude of A Briefe and True Report (1588), although arguably Thomas Harriot's establishment of the parent-child relationship as the model for viewing Indians rationalized ambivalence into a kind of pragmatism. For Scanlan, the rhetoric of love marked English colonialism as Protestant, even if in practice fear was inculcated in the native population whenever possible.	3
The textual complexities of writers such as Harriot and Roger Williams respond particularly well to this approach. Colonial Writing and the New World gains as well from an adept use of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory. Walter Benjamin helps Scanlan position his sense of allegory; Benedict Anderson performs the same role for the understanding of nationalism.	. . .