Angela Vietto

Series: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World

Exploring the wealth of writings by early American women in a broad spectrum of genres, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America presents one of the few synthetic approaches to early US women’s writing. Through an examination of the strategic choices writers made as they constructed their authorial identities at a moment when ideals of both Author and Woman were in flux, Angela Vietto argues that the relationship between gender and authorship was dynamic: women writers drew on available conceptions of womanhood to legitimize their activities as writers, and, often simultaneously, drew on various conceptions of authorship to authorize discursive constructions of gender.

Focusing on the half-century surrounding the Revolution, this study ranges widely over both well-known and more obscure writers, including Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, Hannah Griffitts, Annis Boudinot Stockton, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Deborah Gannett, and Sarah Pogson Smith. The resulting analysis complicates and challenges a number of critical commonplaces, presenting instead a narrative of American literary history that presents the novel as women’s entrée into authorship; dichotomized views of civic and commercial authorship and of manuscript and print cultures; and a persistent sense that women of letters constantly struggled against a literary world that begrudged them entrance based on their gender.

Contents
Introduction: Revolutionary American women writers in literary history; Literary sorority in private and in print: publicizing woman's sphere; Maternal authorship: inscribing manhood; The pen and the sword: women writing women warriors; Authorizing female citizenship: beyond Republican motherhood; On careers for women writers: Murray, Warren, Morton; Epilogue; Bibliography; Notes on selected primary texts; Index.

Reviews
'Women and Authorship provides important ways of re-conceiving key concepts in early American women’s writing, including authorship, separate spheres, and the construction of literary history. Engagingly written and highly informative, it also models a new way of writing such history.'
Susan S. Williams, author of Reclaiming Authorship: Literary Women in America, 1850-1900

About the Author/Editor
Angela Vietto is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, USA.

Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America

Miguel de Asúa and Roger French

Many Early Modern Europeans who during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travelled to the New World left written or pictorial records of their encounters with a surprising fauna. The story told in this book is woven out of the threads of those texts and pictures. A New World of Animals shows how the initial wonder at the new beasts gave way to a more utilitarian approach, assessing their economic and medical potential. It elucidates how shifts in European perceptions brought the animals from the realm of the fantastic into the mainstream of early modern natural history, while at the same time changing the way in which Europeans saw their own world. Indeed, the chronicles and treatises of those who in the wake of the discovery arrived in the new lands tell as much about the particular interests and mental worlds of the writers as about the 'new animals'.

This book traces the amazement of the first explorers and colonizers, the chronicles of soldiers and Indians, the 'natural histories of the New World', the place of animals in the network of economic interests driving the early expansion of Europe, the views of the missionaries and those of natural philosophers and physicians. Taking the reader from the Brazilian forests to the erudite cabinets of the Old World, from Patagonia to the centres of empire, the story of the discovery of the unexpected menagerie of the New World is also an exploration of Early Modern European imagination and learning.

Contents

Preface; Introduction; The unexpected menagerie of the New World; Soldiers and Amerindians; The new histories of the New World; Joyful and profitable news from the New World - animals, medicine and commerce; Learned missionaries and Jesuit scholars; New World animals and the shifting conceptions of natural history; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author/Editor

Miguel de Asúa is Professor at Universidad Nacional de San Martin in Argentina. Dr Roger French was formerly from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, UK.

Further Information

Affiliation: Miguel de Asúa, Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina and Roger French, formerly Cambridge University, UK

Illustrations: Includes 20 b&w illustrations and 2 maps

ISBN: 0 7546 0779 8
Publication Date: 11/2005
Number of Pages: c. 300 pages
Binding: Hardback
Binding Options: Available in Hardback only
Book Size: 234 x 156 mm
British Library Reference: 591.9'8
$90.50/£47.50

From Trade to Strategic Balance, 1700-1922

Arthur Power Dudden

Series: The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900

American Empire in the Pacific explores the empire that emerged from the Oregon Treaty of 1846 with Great Britain and the outcome of the Mexican War in 1848. Together, they signalled the mastery of the United States over the continent of North America; the Pacific Ocean and the ancient civilizations of Asia at last lay within reach. England's East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries had introduced Asian wares including tea to the American colonists, but wars against France and then the struggle for American independence held back expansion by Yankee entrepreneurs until 1783.

Thereafter, from the Atlantic seaboard, American ships began regularly to reach China. Merchants, sailors and missionaries, motivated toward trade and redemption like the Europeans they met along the way, encountered the exotic peoples and cultures of the Pacific. Would-be empire builders projected a manifest destiny without limits. Russian Alaska, the native kingdom of Hawai'i, Japan, Korea, Samoa, and Spain's Philippine Islands, as well as a transcontinental railroad and an isthmian canal, acquired strategic significance in American minds, in time to outweigh both commerce and conversion.

Contents

Introduction; Part 1 The American Republic enters world history: The English background of American isolationism in the 18th century, Felix Gilbert; Chinese export porcelain in 18th-century Tidewater Virginia, Julia B. Curtis. Part 2 Westward Destiny: Strategies for finding the Northwest Passage: the roles of Alexander Mackenzie and Meriwether Lewis, Gunther Barth; The legacy of Old Canton, Jacques M. Downs; American continentalism: an idea of expansion, 1845-1910, Charles Vevier; James Polk, Norman A. Graebner; Matthew Calbraith Perry: antebellum precursor of the steam navy, John H. Schroeder; The sale of Alaska in the context of Russian American relations in the 19th century, N.N. Bolkhovitinov. Part 3 Spreadeagle Imperialism: The independent minister: John M.B. Sill and the struggle against Japanese expansion in Korea, 1894-97, Jeffrey M. Dorwart; Assessing public opinion: editorial comment and the annexation of Hawaii - a case study, George F. Pearce; The American remission of the Boxer Indemnity: a reappraisal, Michael H. Hunt; The Panama Canal and sea power in the Pacific, Alfred Thayer Mahan; Protestant missionaries and American colonialism in the Philippines, 1899-1916: attitudes, perceptions, involvement, Kenton J. Clymer. Part 4 World War And Treaty Making: Wilsonian idealism and Japanese claims at the Paris Peace Conference, Noriko Kawamura; American intervention in Russia: the North Russian Expedition, 1918-19, John W. Long; Look back in anger: the western powers and the Washington Conference of 1921-22, Malcolm H. Murfett; Index.

Further Information

Affiliation: Arthur Power Dudden, Bryn Mawr College, USA

Illustrations: Includes 13 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 0 7546 3049 8
Publication Date: 05/2004
Number of Pages: 412 pages
Binding: Hardback
Binding Options: Available in Hardback only
Book Size: 244 x 169 mm
British Library Reference: 327.7'3'05
Library of Congress Reference: 2003052111

$144.95/£75.00