Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire

by Balkun, Mary McAleer; Imbarrato, Susan C.

• ISBN13: 9781137559906
• ISBN10: 113755990X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-01-12
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The essays in this collection examine the connections between the forces of empire and women's lives in the early Americas, in particular the ways their narratives contributed to empire formation. Focusing on the female body as a site of contestation, the essays describe acts of bravery, subversion, and survival expressed in a variety of genres, including the saga, letter, diary, captivity narrative, travel narrative, verse, sentimental novel, and autobiography. The volume also speaks to a range of female experience, across the Americas and across time, from the Viking exploration to early nineteenth-century United States, challenging scholars to reflect on the implications of early American literature even to the present day.

Author Biography

Mary McAleer Balkun is Professor of English at Seton Hall University, USA. She is the author of The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture and the forthcoming New World Upside Down: The Early American Grotesque.

Susan C. Imbarrato is Professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA. She is the author of Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America and a past President of the Society of Early Americanists.

Table of Contents

Preface; Mary McAleer Balkun and Susan C. Imbarrato
Introduction; Marion Rust
1. Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire; Annette Kolodny
2. Un-gendering Empire: Catalina de Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity; Cathy Rex
3. Creole Civic Pride and Positioning "Exceptional" Black Women; Joan Bristol and Tamara Harvey
4. Imposing Order: Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal and the Anglo-American Empire; Ann Brunjes
5. The Midwife's Calling: Martha Ballard's Diary and the Empire of Medical Knowledge in the Early Republic; Thomas Lawrence Long
6. The Birth Pangs of the American Mother: Puritanism, Republicanism, and the Letter-Journal of Esther Edwards Burr; Samantha Cohen Tamulis
7. Empire and the Pan-Atlantic Self in The Female American; or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield; Denise Mary MacNeil
8. 'The Fever and the Fetters': An Epidemiology of Captivity and Empire; Sarah C. Schuetze
9. Women Left Behind: Female Loyalism, Coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway's Empire of Self; Kacy Tillman
10. 'Solitary, Neglected, Despised': Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality; Astrid M. Fellner and Susanne Hamscha
11. The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement; Brigitte Fielder
12. New World Roots: Transatlantic Fictions, Creole Marriages, and Women's Cultivation of Empire in the Americas; Rochelle Raineri Zuck
13. Catharine Brown's Body: Missionary Spiritualizations and Cherokee Embodiment; Theresa Strouth Gaul
14. Territorial Agency: Negotiations of Space and Empire in the Domestic Violence Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston; Lisa M. Logan
15. 'Her Book the Only Hope She Had': Self and Sovereignty in the Narratives of Ann Carson; Dan Williams
16. Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola