This collection of essays is intended as both a critical companion to The Literatures of Colonial America as well as a broad introduction to the field of early American and comparative colonial studies. Essays are keyed to texts in our anthology, but also refer to works we did not or could not include, and which can be found in other anthologies of this period, and in the growing digital archives and electronic resources of primary documents in the field. The essays discuss major issues shaping the field today, and help contextualize early texts by situating them in relation to broader historical and cultural movements and moments, such as theories of colonialism, imperial projects,the dynamics of diaspora, hybridity, and nation formation, specific literary contexts,and a variety of critical approaches...

Consisting of more than 30 original essays by leading scholars in the field, this Companion provides a broad introduction to Colonial American literatures. The volume situates texts in their various historical and cultural contexts, including colonialism, imperialism, diaspora, and nation formation. In particular,it brings out the comparative, hemispheric,and transatlantic nature of the writing of this period, and highlights the interactions between non-scribal native groups and Europeans that helped to shape early American writing.

The Companion is divided into four main sections: the opening section on issues and methods covers a wide range of approaches to defining and reading early American writing;the second section, entitled "New World Encounters," considers the interactions between cultural groups during the early centuries of exploration; the third section on identities looks at the development of regional spheres of influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; while the final section considers major genres and writers of the period in a series of "Cross-Cultural Conversations."

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Ivy Schweitzer and Susan Castillo

Part I Issues and Methods

1 Prologomenal Thinking: Some Possibilities and Limits of

  Comparative Desire

  Teresa A. Toulouse

2 First Peoples: An Introduction to Early Native American Studies

  Joanna Brooks

3 Toward a Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures:

  Empire, Location, Creolization

  Ralph Bauer

4 Textual Investments: Economics and Colonial American Literatures

  Michelle Burnham

5 The Culture of Colonial America: Theology and Aesthetics

  Paul Giles6 Teaching the Text of Early American Literature

  Michael P Clark

6 Teaching the Text of Early American Literature

  Micbael P.Clark

7 Teaching with the New Technology: Three Intriguing Opportunities

  Edward J. Gallagher

Part II New World Encounters

8 Recovering Precolonial American Literary History:

  "The Origin of Stories" and the Popol Vuh

  Timothy B. Powell

9 Toltec Mirrors: Europeans and Native Americans in Each Other's Eyes

  Renee Bergland

10 Reading for Indian Resistance

Bethany Ridgway Schneider

11 Refocusing New Spain and Spanish Colonization: Malinche,

Guadalupe, and Sor Juana

Electa Arenal and Yolanda Martfnez-San Miguel

12 British Colonial Expansion Westwards: Ireland and America

Andrew Hadfield

13 The French Relation and Its "Hidden" Colonial History

Sara E. Melzer

14 Visions of the Other in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century

Writing on Brazil

Elena Losada Soler

15 New World Ethnography, the Caribbean, and Behn's Oroonoko

Derek Hughes

Part III Negotiating Identities

16 Gendered Voices from Lima and Mexico: Clarinda,

Amarilis, and Sor Juana

Raquel Chang-Rodriguez

17 Cleansing Mexican Antiquity: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

and the loa to The Divine Narcissus

Viviana Diaz Balsera

18 Hemispheric Americanism: Latin American Exiles and

US Revolutionary Writings

Rodrigo Lazo

19 Putting Together the Pieces: Notes on the Eighteenth-

Century Literary Imagination

Douglas Anderson

20 The Transoceanic Emergence of American "Postcolonial" Identities

Gesa Mackenthun

Part IV Genres and Writers: Cross-Cultural Conversations

21 The Genres of Exploration and Conquest Literatures

E. Thomson Shields, Jr.

22 The Conversion Narrative in Early America

Lisa M. Gordis

23 Indigenous Literacies: New England and New Spain

Hilary E. Wyss

24 America's First Mass Media: Preaching and the

Protestant Sermon Tradition

Gregory S. Jackson

25 Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity

in Early America

Phillip H. Round

26 True Relations and Critical Fictions: The Case of the

Personal Narrative in Colonial American Literatures

Kathleen Donegan

27 "Cross-Cultural Conversations": The Captivity Narrative

Lisa M. Logan

28 Epic, Creoles, and Nation in Spanish America

Jose Antonio Mazzotti

29 Plainness and Paradox: Colonial Tensions in the Early New

England Religious Lyric

Amy M. E. Morris

30 Captivating Animals: Science and Spectacle in Early

American Natural Histories

Katbryn Napier Gray

31 Challenging Conventional Historiography: The Roaming

'T'/Eye in Early Colonial American Eyewitness Accounts

Jerry M. Williams

32 Republican Theatricality and Transatlantic Empire

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

33 Reading Early American Fiction

Win fried Fluck

Index