Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the course of organizing and editing this companion volume of essays to our anthology, The Literatures of Colonial America , we were fascinated to observe the extent to which the field has been transformed. A recent review of several anthologies of material from early America calls The Literatures of Colonial America “comparativist,” opining that it offers “perhaps the most ambitious definition of ‘America’: a firmly hemispheric one,” and embraces a “structuralist” methodology, through its emphasis on genre, recurring patterns, and “a deeper structural relationship to the Other” (White and Drexler 2004: 730, 743–4). We happily embrace the labels “comparativist” and ambitiously “hemispheric”; and indeed, an attention to structures, rhetoric, and forms “may be our best (or at least our first ) theoretical means for understanding the hemisphere” (p. 744). We have also been mindful of historical, epistemological, and geographical contexts and have pushed beyond discourses of difference that ground the West's conception of “otherness” to a more thoroughly intersubjective view of New World encounters. Given our concern with recognizing the multicultural and multilingual character of American literature, we wanted to further unsettle the proto-nationalist paradigm this approach implies. Early American literature should not “be only the prehistory to ‘real’ American literature” (Gould ... log in or subscribe to read full text