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Publication Date
4-12-2024
Description
The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.
Keywords
aesthetics, ruins, formalism, Early America, Fragments, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, John Marrant, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Ames, Charles Sullivan, Samuel Atkinson, pseudonymous novelist “Anna”, Thomas Shepard, Massachusetts Bay Colony church records, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Beauchamp Jones, Edward Taylor, Almanac, Lists, Periodicals, Early American studies, Early American literature, Early American aesthetics
Rights
This collection copyright © 2024 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2024 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837–2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Language
eng
ISBN
9781684485109