Consisting of more than 30 original essays by leading scholars in the field, this Companion provides a broad introduction to Colonial American literatures. The volume situates texts in their various historical and cultural contexts, including colonialism, imperialism, diaspora, and nation formation. In particular, it brings out the comparative, hemispheric and transatlantic nature of the writing of this period, and highlights the interactions between non-scribal native groups and Europeans that helped to shape early American writing.
The Companion is divided into four main sections: the opening section on issues and methods covers a wide range of approaches to defining and reading early American writing; the second section, entitled "New World Encounters", considers the interactions between cultural groups during the early centuries of exploration; the third section on identities looks at the development of regional spheres of influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; while the final section considers major genres and writers of the period in a series of "Cross-Cultural Conversations".
The Companion is designed to be used alongside Castillo and Schweitzer's The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
Inhaltsverzeichnis
List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Ivy Schweitzer and Susan Castillo
Part I Issues and Methods 7
1 Prologomenal Thinking: Some Possibilities and Limits of Comparative Desire 9
Teresa A. Toulouse
2 First Peoples: An Introduction to Early Native American Studies 24
Joanna Brooks
3 Toward a Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Location, Creolization 38
Ralph Bauer
4 Textual Investments: Economics and Colonial American Literatures 60
Michelle Burnham
5 The Culture of Colonial America: Theology and Aesthetics 78
Paul Giles
6 Teaching the Text of Early American Literature 94
Michael P. Clark
7 Teaching with the New Technology: Three Intriguing Opportunities 110
Edward J. Gallagher
Part II New World Encounters 121
8 Recovering Precolonial American Literary History: ''The Origin of Stories'' and the Popol Vuh 123
Timothy B. Powell
9 Toltec Mirrors: Europeans and Native Americans in Each Other's Eyes 141
René e Bergland
10 Reading for Indian Resistance 159
Bethany Ridgway Schneider
11 Refocusing New Spain and Spanish Colonization: Malinche, Guadalupe, and Sor Juana 174
Electa Arenal and Yolanda Martí nez-San Miguel
12 British Colonial Expansion Westwards: Ireland and America 195
Andrew Hadfield
13 The French Relation and Its ''Hidden'' Colonial History 220
Sara E. Melzer
14 Visions of the Other in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Writing on Brazil 241
Elena Losada Soler
15 New World Ethnography, the Caribbean, and Behn's Oroonoko 259
Derek Hughes
Part III Negotiating Identities 275
16 Gendered Voices from Lima and Mexico: Clarinda, Amarilis, and Sor Juana 277
Raquel Chang-Rodrí guez
17 Cleansing Mexican Antiquity: Sor Juana Ine s de la Cruz and the loa to The Divine Narcissus 292
Viviana Dí az Balsera
18 Hemispheric Americanism: Latin American Exiles and US Revolutionary Writings 306
Rodrigo Lazo
19 Putting Together the Pieces: Notes on the Eighteenth-Century Literary Imagination 321
Douglas Anderson
20 The Transoceanic Emergence of American ''Postcolonial'' Identities 336
Gesa Mackenthun
Part IV Genres and Writers: Cross-Cultural Conversations 351
21 The Genres of Exploration and Conquest Literatures 353
E. Thomson Shields, Jr.
22 The Conversion Narrative in Early America 369
Lisa M. Gordis
23 Indigenous Literacies: New England and New Spain 387
Hilary E. Wyss
24 America's First Mass Media: Preaching and the Protestant Sermon Tradition 402
Gregory S. Jackson
25 Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity in Early America 426
Phillip H. Round
26 True Relations and Critical Fictions: The Case of the Personal Narrative in Colonial American Literatures 446
Kathleen Donegan
27 ''Cross-Cultural Conversations'': The Captivity Narrative 464
Lisa M. Logan
28 Epic, Creoles, and Nation in Spanish America 480
José Antonio Mazzotti
29 Plainness and Paradox: Colonial Tensions in the Early New England Religious Lyric 500
Amy M. E. Morris
30 Captivating Animals: Science and Spectacle in Early American Natural Histories 517
Kathryn Napier Gray
31 Challenging Conventional Historiography: The Roaming ''I''/Eye in Early Colonial American Eyewitness Accounts 533
Jerry M. Williams
32 Republican Theatricality and Transatlantic Empire 551
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
33 Reading Early American Fiction 566
Winfried Fluck
Index 587
