Early American Literature

This book introduces readers to early American literary studies through original readings of key literary texts.

The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature offers students a literary history of American writing in English between 1492 and 1820, as well as providing a concise social and cultural history of these three centuries. Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture, and explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature. This highly engaging and comprehensive study will be essential reading for students of the literature, history and culture of early America.

An outstanding collection of original critical essays by distinguished specialists, this book is both a chronological survey of nearly 200 years of American literature and an exciting reappraisal of the major figures of that period. Includes works from Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, William Bryd, Anne Bradstreet, William Bradford, and others.

Organized primarily in terms of genre, this handbook includes original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades.

The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.

"A bibliography of poetry composed in what is now the United States of America and printed in the form of books or pamphlets before 1821"--Provided by publisher.

Rather than seeing American literature as beginning with the writings of English or Spanish colonists, Brander Rasmussen points to the wide variety of indigenous writing in the Americas prior to colonization. The study looks at writing between 1524 and the mid-19th century work of Herman Melville.