Introduction / Marion Rust -- Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: first foremother of American empire / Annette Kolodny -- Un-gendering empire: Catalina De Erauso and the performance of masculinity / Cathy Rex -- Creole civic pride and positioning "exceptional" black women / Joan Bristol and Tamara Harvey -- Imposing order: Sarah Kemble Knight's journal and the Anglo-American empire / Ann Brunjes -- The midwife's calling: Martha Ballard's diary and the empire of medical knowledge in the early republic / Thomas Lawrence Long -- The birth pangs of the American mother: puritanism, republicanism, and the letter-journal of Esther Edwards Burr / Samantha Cohen Tamulis -- Empire and the pan-Atlantic self in the female American; or, The adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield / Denise Mary Macneil -- "The fever and the fetters": an epidemiology of captivity and empire / Sarah C. Schuetze -- Women left behind: female loyalism, coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway's Empire of self / Kacy Tillman -- "Solitary, neglected, despised": cruel optimism and national sentimentality / Astrid M. Fellner and Susanne Hamscha -- The woman of colour and Black Atlantic Movement / Brigitte Fielder -- New world roots: transatlantic fictions, Creole marriages, and women's cultivation of empire in the Americas / Rochelle Raineri Zuck -- Catharine Brown's body: missionary spiritualizations and Cherokee embodiment / Theresa Strouth Gaul -- Territorial agency: negotiations of space and empire in the domestic violence memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston / Lisa M. Logan -- "Her book the only hope she had": self and sovereignty in the narratives of Ann Carson / Dan Williams -- Bodies of work: early American women writers, empire, and pedagogy / Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola.
Summary:
Women's Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire' examines the connections between women's experience and the forces of empire to reveal the ways women's assertions and protests participated in the processes associated with empire formation. The sixteen essays in this collection describe acts of bravery, protest, and survival expressed in a variety of genres, including the saga, letter, diary, captivity narrative, travel narrative, verse, sentimental novel, and autobiography. The concluding essay examines theories of anthology selection, the ways women's writings have been variously included and excluded, and the implications for the study of literature of the early Americas. Throughout, the focus is on the female body and the ways it figures as a site of contestation in emerging empires. The volume thus speaks to a range of female experience, across the Americas and across time, from the Viking exploration to the early nineteenth century United States.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.