Reviews of Books

The Americas in Writing

Early American Writings. Edited by CARLA MULFORD, general editor, and ANGELA VIETTO and AMY E. WINANS, associate editors. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 1129. $ 75.00 cloth, $ 47.95 paper.)

Reviewed by Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame

Colonial American literature is arguably the most vibrant field in American literary studies today. In the last six years an explosion of anthologies designed to make widely available a broad range of non-canonical writings produced in and about Great Britain's colonies in the Western hemisphere has provided teachers and scholars with important new tools. Driven partly by the identity-based recuperation movements of the 1970s and 1980s, partly by a new awareness of the importance of texts circulated in manuscript or newspapers rather than in book form, and partly by dissatisfaction with the predominant Puritan origins narrative and a swelling interest in transnationalism, anthologies including Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner's The English Literatures of America, 1580–1800 (Routledge, 1996), Vincent Carretta's Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington, Ky., 1996), Sharon M. Harris's Early American Women Writers to 1800 (Oxford, 1996), and Thomas W. Krise's Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777 (Chicago, 1999), as well as the University of Massachusetts Press series on native writers, have made a vast array of once obscure English-language works readily available. In a tight academic book market, anthology editors have convinced prestigious university presses to bring out a remarkable number of new collections. Admittedly, some of these new volumes represent an effort by colonialists to catch up to the rest of the field of Americanist scholarship, providing the pre-literary history to contemporary Caribbean or African American literature. In an important sense, however, colonialists occupy a unique position among Americanists. At a moment when many scholars are rejecting nationalist narratives of literary history, which they view as the intellectual equivalent of isolationism in a world increasingly committed to globalization, students of colonial American literature rightly claim a pre-national vantage point. A transnational approach to colonial literature has the attractive features of being both intellectually sound and trendy.

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