Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation
Backgrounds and Contexts
John C. Shields
Description
Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation is a groundbreaking scholarly study of one of America's most important and most controversial writers. Wheatley (1753-1784) was the first African American to publish a book on any subject in the new country, and America's second woman to do so. There is probably no other American writer who has produced such critical controversy as Phillis Wheatley.
In this new volume, John C. Shields-one of the foremost scholars of Wheatley- demonstrates that much of the negative response to her writings has been based on false assumptions and myths about her and her work. Much of this criticism began more than a century ago and has been passed on without dissent by generations of readers. Here, Shields sets a course for Wheatley scholars that will redefine the direction of
future writing about her.
Shields begins this volume with an incisive analysis of more than two hundred years of complicated and often misinformed scholarship and commentary about Wheatley. In following chapters, he explores Wheatley's background and the cultural context in which she wrote.
Shields provides new and subtle readings for a great many of her poems. He shows that Wheatley's writing was deeply imbedded in several literary traditions, demonstrating that her work is the result of an African inheritance, a complex relationship with a Congregationalist religious heritage, and an intense involvement with classical literature. Read closely, Wheatley's works show she deserves credit for creating a liberationist aesthetic-the full implications of which are still to be worked out.
This important new study is certain to become the standard in the field. Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation is essential for all students and scholars of American literature, African American literature, women's literature, and multicultural literature.
John C. Shields is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and the author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self, which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book award and an honorable mention in the Harry Levin Prize competition, sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Center for Classicism in American Culture at Illinois State University.
Cloth Edition, $37.95
Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-499-1
Status: Forthcoming
Library of Congress No.: LC 2007037805 Publication Date: 6/15/2008
From Ulster to America
Michael Montgomery
Description
From Ulster to America documents nearly four hundred terms and meanings—each with quotations from both sides of the Atlantic—contributed to American English by these eighteenth-century settlers from Ulster. Drawing on letters they sent back to their homeland and on other archival documents associated with their settlement, it shows that Ulster emigrants and their children contributed as much to regional American English as any other group. The numerous quotations bring alive the speech of earlier days on both sides of the Atlantic, and extend understanding of the culture, mannerisms, and life of those pioneering times.
Edition, $30.00s
ISBN: 1-903688-61-2
Publication Date: 3/14/2007
Joel Barlow’s Columbiad
A Bicentennial Reading
Steven Blakemore
Description
The year 2007 marks the two-hundredth anniversary since Joel Barlow, an American poet and diplomat, first published his controversial and lengthy poem, The Columbiad. Grandiose in its ambition, Barlow framed the poem as an epic for the New World, a nationalist primer to teach republican citizens the history of the relatively new nation culminating in the American Revolution and the promise of a future utopia stimulated by the United States' republican ideas and institutions.
Unfortunately, history has not been kind to Barlow's work. Literary critics have long dismissed it for its obscure references and allusions to historical and mythic events, to individuals and characters that a select few would know or care about. Indeed, as Joseph Buckminister, an acquaintance of Barlow, noted, “[This poem] requires an amazing universal knowledge . . . . A man must be not only a poet and a man of letters, but a lawyer, politician, physician, divine, chemist, natural historian, and adept in all the fine arts.”
But this work does matter, argues Steven Blakemore, and Joel Barlow's Columbiad is the first full-length study of poem. Blakemore shows that Barlow crafted a historically relevant New World epic- a literary foundation myth for America as ambitious as those created by Homer and Virgil for Greece and Rome-an epic that is the most significant American narrative poem of the nineteenth century.
Blakemore offers a close reading of The Columbiad within the context of contemporary national debates over the significance of America. In doing so, he helps the reader understand the variety of national discourses that Barlow was promoting, challenging, or subverting. Long neglected, The Columbiad fundamentally engages the core issues and strategies of national self-definition and the creation of a vital republican culture. This book will appeal to all those interested in early American literature, the literature of the early Republic, and American literary nationalism.
Steven Blakemore is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. He has published on a variety of topics in English and American literature and is the author of three recent books dealing with the Anglo-American debate on the French Revolution.Cloth Edition, $45.00s
Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-563-7
Library of Congress No.: LC 2006019478
Publication Date: February 2007
The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia
Christopher E. Hendricks
Description
For decades historians and historical geographers have neglected the study of town life in the colonial South, simply portraying towns as the result of increasing population density. The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia, the first comprehensive study of town development in the interior of the colonial South, marshals evidence that planned urban settlements were the essential agents in accelerating westward expansion.
Through the analysis of twenty-five attempts to create towns in the Virginia backcountry, the work demonstrates there was a distinctly southern urban
movement in the colonial period. It explores the factors that lead to the success or failure of a community and examines how each backcountry region operated as an economic unit uniquely suited to its development.
Towns opened up land, attracting people to move into new areas or participate in new business opportunities. They furthered settlement, influenced immigration, created family and social networks, and fostered the development of trade and systems of credit. The actions of a few individuals and groups of people resulted in the rapid occupation, settlement, and development of the Virginia backcountry through the consciouscreation of economic and social forces.
The most complete study of southern towns since John Reps’s Tidewater Towns, The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia offers a new understanding of property ownership, burgeoning trade, and immigration factors–the very elements of urban centers–in backcountry Virginia.
Christopher E. Hendricks is professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University. He is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Appalachia and his publications have appeared in the Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, the Journal of Southwest Georgia History, and the North Carolina Historical Review.
Cloth Edition, $36.00Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-543-2
Publication Date: 11/15/2006
Two Carpenters
Architecture and Building in Early New England, 1799–1859
J. Ritchie Garrison
Description
This innovative study examines the lives of two New England carpenters, Calvin and George Stearns, who were active in the first half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on their written accounts and examining their legacy of buildings—a record as extensive and richly detailed as any that exists
—J. Ritchie Garrison recovers the stylistic influences, family patterns, work habits, social customs, tools, and business practices that shaped the Stearnses’ identities as rural builders during a time of profound change.
Although study of the region’s architectural forms began in the late nineteenth century and social historians have extensively discussed the emergence of rural capitalism in New England, there is still much to learn about the process by which these landscapes and buildings came into being. As Garrison shows, the Stearnses personified the dynamic interrelationships of city and country, and of industry and farming, as they filtered change through the actions of everyday living. Profusely illustrated with drawings and photographs, the book follows the Stearnses as they moved from newly settled towns on New England’s northern frontier, to federal-era Boston, the agricultural village of Northfield, Massachusetts, and the resort community of Brattleboro, Vermont. By tracing the lives and careers of these two carpenters, Garrison provokes readers to consider why things look the way they do, how they got that way, and what they mean.
J. Ritchie Garrison is director of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and professor of history at the University of Delaware. His is the author of Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770–1860.
Cloth Edition, $48.95Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-485-1
Library of Congress No.: LC 2005032124 Publication Date: 7/10/2006
The Silent and Soft Communion
The Spiritual Narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill
Edited by Sue Lane McCulley and Dorothy Z. Baker
With an Introduction by Dorothy Z. Baker
Conversion narratives were one of the earliest forms of public expression for American women writers, sanctioned—and indeed welcomed—for their personal, first-hand testimonies about seasons of religious grace. Two eighteenth-century women, Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill, wrote conversion narratives of remarkable craft and insight. These pieces, collected for the first time in The Silent and Soft Communion, represent two generations of Calvinist evangelism, addressing the social implications of spiritual regeneration and presenting full, fascinating accounts of Calvinist religious life.
Sarah Pierpont Edwards is best known as the wife of Jonathan Edwards, one of the most renowned theologians in eighteenth-century New England. Asked by her husband to “draw up an exact statement” of her rebirth in Christ, she complied, creating in 1742 a work that was of considerable interest to both her husband’s constituency and now to modern scholars. A rich and revealing document, her narrative expresses her immense joy in the presence of God and the intimacy of her relationship with God. Both a private and public statement, her testimony is remarkable for its position on the social imperative of spiritual regeneration and speaks to the social and political issues facing her Northampton community.
The companion conversion narrative by Sarah Prince Gill, never before published, offers the perspective of the next generation of Calvinist women, whose religious orientation was inflected by Enlightenment values. Gill, an educated Bostonian and close friend of the Edwards family, documents in her 1742 narrative the dramatic story of her struggle for spiritual enlightenment. A private document, Gill’s journal offers a striking contrast to Edwards’s more public writings.
Featuring scholarly annotations and an extensive introductory essay, The Silent and Soft Communion is an invaluable historical and theological resource.
The Editors: Sue Lane McCulley is instructor of English at Wharton County Junior College in Wharton, Texas.
Dorothy Z. Baker is associate professor of English at the University of Houston. She is the editor of Poetics in the Poem: Critical Essays on American Self-Reflexive Poetry and author of Mythic Masks in Self-Reflexive Poetry.
Publication Date: September 2005
152 est. pp., Illustrations
Subject(s): Religion and Theology, Religion in the United States, Women’s Studies, American Studies, Literature, American History
Smoking and Culture
The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America
Edited by Sean M. Rafferty and Rob Mann
Smoking has played an important role in the cultures of North America since ancient times. Because of the ceremonial and ritual aspects of the practice in Native American societies, smoking pipes are important cultural artifacts. The essays in Smoking and Culture constitute the first sustained interpretive study of smoking pipes, focusing on the cultural significance of smoking both before and after European contact.
Pipes lend themselves to anthropological as well as archaeological analysis in part because they are more ceremonial than utilitarian. Thus, while their styles and provenance can reveal something about trade relationships, cultural transfer, and aesthetic influences, they also provide important information about the nature of ritual in a particular society. As the contributors demonstrate, pipes offer a window through which to view the symbolic, ideological, and political roles that smoking has played in North American societies from prehistoric times to the nineteenth century.
The eleven essays included range widely over time and region, beginning with a case study of pipes and mortuary practices in the Ohio Valley during the Early Woodland Period. Subsequent chapters examine stone pipes from coastal North Carolina during the Late Woodland Period and the role pipes played in interregional interaction among protohistoric Native American groups in the Midwest and Northeast. Other essays explore the variety of cultural and political uses of pipes during the period of European contact. The final section of the book focuses on smoking in Euro-American contexts of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
The innovative interpretive approaches taken by the contributors and the broad historical perspective will make Smoking and Culture a model for examining other categories of material culture, and the volume will be welcomed by anthropologists and historians as well as archaeologists.
The Editors: Sean M. Rafferty is associate professor of anthropology at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Rob Mann is the southeast regional archaeologist for Louisiana and is based in the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University.
Contributors: Anna S. Agbe-Davies, Charles A. Bello, Patricia Capone, Diane Dallal, Elinor Downs, Penelope B. Drooker, Jeffrey D. Irwin, Rob Mann, Michael S. Nassaney, Sean M. Rafferty, Paul Reckner, Neal L. Trubowitz, Richard Veit.
Publication Date: February 2005
416 est. pp., Illustrations
Subject(s): Archaeology, Native American Studies, American History to 1860
Cloth Edition, $48.00s
Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-350-2
May 13, 2008