Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System

Burnham, Michelle

doi:10.1349/ddlp.776

Cited by 18 publications

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“…As Stephen Greenblatt (1991) argues, in these very early accounts, the central figure is wonder; it registers a response to what is "at once unbelievable and true" (21). 84 In the seventeenth century, as Michelle Burnham (2007) illustrates in the case of New England writing, the discourse of wonder was displaced by the discourse of investment, in so-called promotional writing (37). Wonder, as Burnham argues, in seventeenth-century New England would have discouraged investment (35).…”

Section: Research On American Travel Writing Of the Early Republic: A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In travel reports on colonial New England this plain style is "characterized less by 83 Cheyfitz here contradicts Spengemann's assessment of the significance of Columbus's activities and his writing. 84 See also Greenblatt (1991), 14, andMichelle Burnham's (2007) reference to Greenblatt (32). On figurations of wonder see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (1998).…”

Section: Research On American Travel Writing Of the Early Republic: A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Heide¹

2022

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Travel reports have shaped the emergence of early U.S. culture and its “geographical imagination” (David Harvey). Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere examines the trans-national imagination in travel reports by American authors written between 1770 and 1830. Its range is from John and William Bartram’s pre-revolutionary travelogues and Jonathan Carver’s exploratory report on his journey in the Great Lakes region (1778), to Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), to early nineteenth-century reports, such as Anne Newport Royall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) and William Duane’s A Visit to Colombia (1826). The chapters of the monograph concentrate on writing about journeys to the North American ‘interior‘, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. The primary sources were written between the beginning of the struggle against British rule, following the end of the French and Indian War, and the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The decades between 1770 and 1830 were times of shifting colonial boundaries, nation-building, and emergent discourses of collective identification in North America. The study reads travel writing in the context of the identity-generating discourses of nation-building, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and cosmopolitanism. In contrast to scholarship that engages a notion of Americanness based primarily on ‘domestic’ outlooks and experiences such as westward expansion (the frontier), the study highlights the function of categories such as the outside world, neighboring nations, and colonial empires in the emergence of U.S. national literary imagination. How does a shift in focus from a discursive ‘domestication’ of North American space to an interest in the Othering of what lies beyond national borders affect the understanding of the emergent national self? These are the kind of questions that begin by seeing the transnational as a fundamental element of national emergence. The monograph ultimately works to demonstrate how travel writing – with very few exceptions – supports and affirms processes of nation-building. Thus, the national narrative evolves from representations of contact scenarios in North America, in the transatlantic world, and around the globe. Without ignoring the roles of national mythology, the analysis concentrates on the continual co-existence of fluid notions of both ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ in times of shifting geographical borders. From such a perspective, travel writing not only contributes to shaping the national imagination and its conceptions of superiority but is also complicit in territorial expansionism and its subjugation of conquered peoples and their respective cultural histories. The present study emphasizes the significance of accounts of non-voluntary movement that embrace captivity narratives, slave narratives, sailor narratives, and reports by individuals who had access to neither publishing nor public culture. Accounts by such authors have often been published posthumously, promoted by printers, professional authors, or scholars. The central focus of analysis, however, examines how American self-fashioning and self-positioning in the world appear in the travel writing of the period. The trans-national imagination engages in a symbolic construction both of the collective national ‘Self’ and of the outside world as the nation’s ‘Other.’ Travel writing functions as a tool in the nation-building process of the United States: a tool that reflects the mindset of the time, a tool that imagines a national community, and a tool that shapes the mindset of a people. The study maintains that travel writing, as a literary format, negotiates the triangular relationship between American post-revolutionary nation-building, continued European colonial expansion in the Americas, and the ongoing existence of indigenous nations. Underlying each of the readings is a common thesis that travel writing defines and negotiates borders, limits, and territorial expansion, and that it does so within the parameters of nation-building.

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Section: Research On American Travel Writing Of the Early Republic: A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research On American Travel Writing Of the Early Republic: A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Heide¹

2022

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Pirate Narratives and the Colonial Atlantic

Ganser

2020

Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy

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This chapter examines the transformation of the Caribbean pirate into a colonial agent on the one hand and an enemy for Puritan society on the other around 1700. It begins with an analysis of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678), which inspired a series of ethnographic narratives about the New World by former ‘pirates’ at the time (e.g., William Dampier, Basil Ringrose, Bartholomew Sharp, Lionel Wafer), written as evidence of their authors’ gradual transformation into scientists. They adopted the discourse of science and helped legitimize colonial plunder—material and symbolic—as beneficial to the European ‘empire of knowledge’. The second part focuses on gallows narratives and anti-piratical sermons in Puritan New England, which articulated piracy as sinful, devilish, and destructive for the community. Public executions of pirates and the sermons and broadsides produced for these events used the figure of the pirate as an Other against whom to produce and renew third-generation Puritan social cohesion. Cotton Mather’s and other ministers’ comments on piracy are read as a response to the perception of collective crisis of Puritan society.

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William Cowper, the Georgic, and the Unwritten Literature of the 1780s

Thorne¹

2017

Boundary 2

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Eighteenth-century English poetry, epic in technique and idiom even when not epic in scale, has some unusual ways of telling stories on a multicontinental scale—stories, that is, that are not confined to localities nor even to nations. This is a feat that novels struggle to replicate. The georgic is especially interesting in this regard, since the genre is officially agrarian and provincial—the poetry of a certain crop or USDA growing zone. And yet georgic poems in English almost always take an epic and planetary turn. William Cowper's The Task shows how a poem seemingly rooted in place can nonetheless begin to map much larger systems.

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Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System

Abstract: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cited by 18 publications

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Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere Transnational Imagination in Early American Travel Writing (1770–1830)

Pirate Narratives and the Colonial Atlantic

William Cowper, the Georgic, and the Unwritten Literature of the 1780s

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