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

Mary McAleer Balkun, Susan C. Imbarrato, Mary McAleer Balkun, Susan C. Imbarrato

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349581023, 9781137559906
• eBook ISBN: 9781137543233
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire
• 2 Ungendering Empire: Catalina de Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity
• 3 Creole Civic Pride and Positioning “Exceptional” Black Women
• 4 Imposing Order: Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal and the Anglo-American Empire
• 5 The Midwife’s Calling: Martha Ballard’s Diary and the Empire of Medical Knowledge in the Early Republic
• 6 The Birth Pangs of the American Mother: Puritanism, Republicanism, and the Letter-Journal of Esther Edwards Burr
• 7 Empire and the Pan-Atlantic Self in The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield
• 8 “The Fever and the Fetters”: An Epidemiology of Captivity and Empire
• 9 Women Left Behind: Female Loyalism, Coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway’s Empire of Self
• 10 “Solitary, Neglected, Despised”: Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality
• 11 The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement
• 12 New World Roots: Transatlantic Fictions, Creole Marriages, and Women’s Cultivation of Empire in the Americas
• 13 Catharine Brown’s Body: Missionary Spiritualization and Cherokee Embodiment
• 14 Territorial Agency: Negotiations of Space and Empire in the Domestic Violence Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston
• 15 “Her Book the Only Hope She Had”: Self and Sovereignty in the Narratives of Ann Carson
• 16 Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy
• Notes on Contributors
• Index