Early America Re-explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture

Early America Re-Explored is a transatlantic joint venture in which scholars from the United States, England, and Germany re-read and recontextualize American writings from the colonial to the antebellum periods. The authors and topics analyzed range from Winthrop and Puritan rhetorics, the Pynchons and Ha(w)thornes, Puritan missionary discourse, Rowlandson’s captivity narrative in the context of Native American history, Scottish-American self-fashioning, the cultural inscription of Ashbridge’s autobiography, and the transatlantic subtext of Wheatley’s poetry, to the theory and practice of the early American novel, play, and short story, the role of geography books in the construction of American identities, women and Native Americans in Child and Sedgwick, the abolitionist writings of M. Stewart, political dimensions of Bryant’s poetry and of the nineteenth-century rogue narrative, technology in antebellum short stories, and postcolonial aspects of Cooper’s, Poe’s, and Melville’s sea fiction. The contributors include J. Achilles, S. Bercovitch, M. Brueckner, V. Carretta, W. Fluck, U. Hebel, F. Kelleter, S. Krause, G. Mackenthun, D. Madsen, S. Matter-Seibel, O. Moore, N. Salisbury, D. Schloss, J. Schoepp, D. Williams, and J. Zanger.