Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America

Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men’s and women’s places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women’s conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions. William J. Scheick, J.R. Miliken Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Design in Puritan American Literature. Addresses the question of how to understand colonial women’s writing given the gendered constraints they faced in their creative endeavors. —American Literature Small and compact, with an excellent index and bibliography, this book joins such similar titles as Amy Lang\u27s Prophetic Women and American Women Writers to 1800, ed. by Sharon Harris. Highly recommended for both undergraduates and advanced scholars. —Choice Offers material of great interest to students and scholars interested in emergent women’s voices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. —Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography It is hard to see that criticism can do more: this is a book which should be read by anyone with an interest in colonial writing; I hope it will be turned to by others well beyond the field. —Journal of American Studies Colonialists and specialists in American women\u27s writing, as well as those who believe in an ethos of looking closely and with respect at the object of study, will come away from this book enriched and encouraged. —Journal of English and Germanic Philology Scheick has made an important and welcome contribution to the growing literature on early American women, writing, and authority. —New England Quarterly Reveals a great deal about the presence of female voices and the struggle between orthodox and individual authority. —Rocky Mountain Review A provocative book which corroborates some of our earlier ideas about female writing in colonial America and finds some new ways of looking at familiar verse and prose. —Seventeenth-Century News The book is short, to the point, timely and rooted in careful attention to primary texts. —South Atlantic Review Should prove a useful book to a variety of readers. Scheick nuances and complicates past feminist readings of authors like Anne Bradstreet, while contributing new readings of writers like Mary English, Esther Burr, Elizabeth Hanson, and Phillis Wheatley. —Teresa A. Toulouse Scheick convincingly demonstrates the ways in which these early texts express the uncertainties of female authorization in colonial America. —The American Cultural Association Journal Provocative, tightly argued, and well written. . . . It models a productive blend of solid historical and cultural contextualizing with the often neglected practice of close, attentive reading. —William and Mary Quarterly This is required reading for scholars in the period. —Year’s Work in English Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_literature/1008/thumbnail.jp

Design in Puritan American Literature

Puritan American writers faced a dilemma: they had an obligation to use language as a celebration of divine artistry, but they could not allow their writing to become an iconic graven image of authorial self-idolatry. In this study William Scheick explores one way in which William Bradford, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet, Urian Oakes, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards mediated these conflicting imperatives. They did so, he argues, by creating moments in their works when they and their audience could hesitate and contemplate the central paradox of language: its capacity to intimate both concealed authorial pride and latent deific design. These ambiguous occasions served Puritan writers as places where the threat of divine wrath and the promise of divine mercy intersected in unresolved tension. By the nineteenth century the heritage of this Christlike mingling of temporal connotation and eternal denotation had mutated. A peculiar late eighteenth-century narrative by Nathan Fiske and a short story by Edward Bellamy both suggest that the binary nature of language exploited by their Puritan ancestors was still a vital authorial concern; but neither of these writers affirms the presence of an eternal denotative signification hidden within the conflicting historical contexts of their apparently allegorical language. For them, appreciation of the mystery of a divine revelation possibly concealed in words yielded to puzzlement over language itself, specifically over the inadequacy of language to signify more than its own instability of design. This book is a tightly focused study of an important aspect of Puritan American writers\u27 use of language by one of the leading scholars in the field of early American literature. William J. Scheick is J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and editor of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. A magisterial study of the uses of language by the major early American puritan writers—among them Bradford, Ward, Bradstreet, Taylor, and Edwards—by one of the leading scholars of their period —Kenneth Cherryhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1026/thumbnail.jp

The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

The half-blood—half Indian, half white—is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed half Indian, half white, and half devil —or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American prototype? In this important first study of the fictional half-blood, William J. Scheick examines works ranging from the enormously popular dime novels” and the short fiction of such writers as Bret Harte to the more sophisticated works of Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. He discovers that ambivalence characterized nearly all who wrote of the half-blood. Some writers found racial mixing abhorrent, while others saw more benign possibilities. The use of a half-blood in spirit —a character of untainted blood who joined the virtues of the two races in his manner of life—was one ingenious literary strategy adopted by a number of writers, Scheick also compares the literary portrayal of the half-blood with the nineteenth-century view of the mulatto. This pioneering examination of an important symbol in popular literature of the last century opens up a previously unexplored repository of attitudes toward American civilization. An important book for all those concerned with the course of American culture and literature. William J. Scheick, J. R. Miliken Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Design in Puritan American Literature and Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America. Straightforward and concise exploration of how the nineteenth-century American mind responded to the actual and symbolic mingling of red and white blood, barbaric and civilized societies. —The South Carolina Review Suggestive for anyone interested in the vocabulary of race relations. —Journal of American Historyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1015/thumbnail.jp

Whitman and the Afterlife: "Sparkles from the Wheel"

Reads "Sparkles from the Wheel" as a poem "about time, especially in relation to the afterlife," that views life as "an ongoing sequence of spiraling trajectories in which every ending is always a new beginning.