Product Description: Native converts to Christianity, dubbed "praying Indians" by seventeenth-century English missionaries, have long been imagined as benign cultural intermediaries between English settlers and "savages." More recently, praying Indians have been dismissed as virtual inventions of the colonists: "good" Indians used to justify mistreatment of "bad" ones...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Native converts to Christianity, dubbed "praying Indians" by seventeenth-century English missionaries, have long been imagined as benign cultural intermediaries between English settlers and "savages." More recently, praying Indians have been dismissed as virtual inventions of the colonists: "good" Indians used to justify mistreatment of "bad" ones...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Presenting a literary history of American writing (from 1492 to 1820) and a concise social and cultural history, Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture. He explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature...read more

Product Description: In colonial America, tales about the capture of English settlers by Native American war parties and the captives' subsequent suffering and privations were wildly popular among readers. Despite their importance in the development of American literature, however, the origins of the captivity narrative have until now been largely unexplored...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: The stories now being told about the colonial American past represent an "America" newly found, as scholars continue to evaluate and revise the longer-standing stories that have, across the centuries, held particular cultural and critical sway...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Transatlantic Insurrections, Paul Giles offers a fresh view of how the cultures of Britain and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries intertwined in mutually disorienting ways. Giles traces the paradoxical relations between English and American literature from 1730 through 1860, suggesting how the formation of a literary tradition in each national culture was deeply dependent upon negotiation with its transatlantic counterpart...read more

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Product Description: The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Uncovers the strategies early African American writers used both to create an African American identity and to make their visions and stories accessible to white readers. Alongside these pioneers of black American literature Zafar juxtaposes some familiar European American Writers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Devil's Mousetrap approaches the thought of three colonial New England divines--Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor--from the perspective of literary theory. Author Linda Munk focuses on the background of these men's ideas and on the sources from which they drew, both directly and indirectly, in framing their theology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Algonquian and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Part historical narrative, part textual analysis, this book traces the development of American Indian literature from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War. Bernd C. Peyer focuses on the lives and writings of four prominent Indian missionaries -- Samson Occom of the Mohegans, William Apess of the Pequots, Elias Boudinot of the Cherokees, and George Copway of the Ojibwa -- each of whom struggled to negotiate a secure place between the imperatives of colonial rule and the rights of native peoples...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Capitalism in Early American Literature: Texts and Contexts is a literary history that shows how the idea of America as the land of capitalist enterprise - where rewards are always commensurate with productivity - came to flourish in our national literature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in American Literature discusses how, where, and to what extent Rousseau's philosophy can be traced in the first one-hundred years of American literature. It examines this problem by using original quotations from such works as Emile, Du Contrat Social, and Discours sur l'Inégalité, and compares them with examples from sixteen American authors and the Connecticut Wits without forcing them into a desired picture...read more

Product Description: From the time of its first appearance, the story of Pocahontas has provided the terms of a flexible discourse that has been put to multiple, and at times contradictory, uses. Centering around her legendary rescue of John Smith from the brink of execution and her subsequent marriage to a white Jamestown colonist, the Pocahontas convention became a source of national debate over such broad issues as miscegenation, racial conflict, and colonial expansion...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection of new essays enters one of the most topical and energetic debates of our time--the subject of ethnicity. The recent vigorous debates being waged over questions raised by the phenomenon of multiculturalism in America highlight the fact that American culture has arisen out of an unusually rich and interactive ethnic mix...read more

Product Description: This collection reflects changing concepts in the field of early American literature. Studies by leading scholars celebrate the achievements of Harrison T. Meserole--colonialist, bibliographer, and Shakespeare scholar extraordinaire.

Product Description: Nelson provides a study of the ways in which Anglo-American authors constructed "race" in their works from the time of the first British colonists through the period of the Civil War. She focuses on some eleven texts, ranging from widely-known to little-considered, that deal with the relations among Native, African, and Anglo-Americans, and places her readings in the historical, social, and material contexts of an evolving U...read more

Product Description: This book, the second volume in Seelye's series on the rivers of America in the American imagination, explores how George Washington's vision of a "more perfect union" for America--based upon the linking of the nation's waterways by technical means--was carried out...read more