Abstract
This chapter is essentially an ethnology of twentieth- and a few twenty-first-century college-level American literature anthologies that include works by four of the best known early American women writers: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Phillis Wheatley. Because they are the most anthologized female authors from the colonial period, their extracted work can chart changing rationales for inclusion and exclusion. In addition, their biographies, original audiences, publication records, and genres are varied and thus culturally indicative of the Anglo-American literary tradition. The women range from a classically educated, politically astute, elite Puritan poet; to a biblically literate, prosperous Puritan minister’s wife whose spiritual autobiography focused on her three-month captivity among Indians; to a middle-class Wife-of-Bath figure who infused the personal journal of her travels from Boston to New York and back with humor and social satire; to a slave who became a child prodigy, a scholar, a Neoclassical poet, and, especially after manumission and marriage, a political activist.
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Works Cited
Anthologies
For ease of reference, I have alphabetized anthologies by title, not editor(s), because that is how we tend to refer to them.
America in Literature, Part One: The First Two Centuries, Theodore L. Gross and David Levin, eds. New York: Wiley, 1978. Print.
American Heritage: An Anthology and Interpretive Survey of Our Literature, Carl Bode, Leon Howard, and Louis Wright, eds. Boston: Heath, 1955. Print.
American Life in Literature, Jay B. Hubbell, ed. 1936. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 1949. Print.
American Literature, Richard Poirier and William L. Vance, eds. Volume One. Boston: Little, 1970. Print.
American Literature, 1607–1885, Charles F. Richardson, ed. New York: Haskell, 1886, 1888. Print.
American Literature: The Makers and the Making, Cleanth R Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. New York: St. Martin’s, 1973. Print.
American Literature: Tradition and Innovation, Harrison T. Meserole, Walter Sutton, and Brom Weber, eds. 1969. Lexington: Heath, 1974. Print.
American Literature Survey, Colonial and Federal to 1800, Milton R. Stern and Seymour L. Gross, eds. New York: Viking, 1962. Print.
American Poetry and Prose, Norman Foerster, ed. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1947. Print.
American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, Harrison T. Meserole, ed. State College: Penn State UP, 1985. Print.
The American Tradition in Literature, Richard Beatty, Sculley Bradley, and E. Hudson Long, eds. 1956. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1967. Print.
The American Tradition in Literature, Richard Beatty, Sculley Bradley, E. Hudson Long and George Perkins, eds. 1956. 4th ed. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1974. Print.
American Women Writers to 1800, Sharon M. Harris, ed. New York: Oxford, 1996. Print.
The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson, eds. 2008. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford, 2014. Print.
Century Readings for a Course in American Literature, Fred Lewis Pattee, ed. New York: Century, 1919. Print.
A College Book of American Literature, Milton Ellis et al., eds. Volume One. New York: American, 1939. Print.
Colonial American Writing, Roy Harvey Pearce, ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1950. Print.
Colonial and Federalist American Writing, George F. Horner and Robert A. Bain, eds. New York: Odyssey, 1966. Print.
Cyclopedia of American Literature, Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, eds. Volume One. New York: Scribner: 1855. Print.
Digital American Literature Anthology, Michael O’Conner, ed. 2013. Web.
Early American Writing, Giles Gunn, ed. New York: Penguin, 1994. Print.
Early American Writings, Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans, eds. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
The English literatures of America, Myra Jchlcn and Michael Warner, eds. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
The Female Poets of America, Rufus Griswold, ed. Philadelphia: Carey and Hunt, 1849. Print.
The Growth of American Literature: A Critical and Historical Survey, Edwin Harrison Cady, Frederick J. Hoffman, and Roy Harvey Pearce, eds. Volume One. New York: American, 1956. Print.
The Harper American Literature, Donald McQuadc, Robert Atwan, Martha Banta, et al., eds. Volume One. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Print.
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Paul Lauter et al., eds. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1990. Print.
The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology, Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, eds. Oxford : Blackwell, 2001. Print.
Major American Writers, Howard Mumford Jones and Ernest E. Leisy, eds. New York: Harcourt, 1935. Print.
Major Writers of America, Perry Miller et al., eds. Volume One. New York: Harcourt, 1962. Print.
Masters of American Literature, Henry A. Pochmann and Gay Wilson Allen, eds. Volume One. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Print.
The Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers, Katharine M. Rogers, ed. New York: Meridian, 1991. Print.
The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds. New York: New York UP, 2000. Print.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Nina Baym, Ronald Gottesman, et al., eds. 1989. New York: Norton, 2011. Print.
O Brave New World: American Literature from 1600 to 1840: A Critical Anthology of American literature, Leslie A. Fiedler and Arthur Zeiger, eds. Volume One. New York: Dell, 1968. Print.
The Puritans, Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds. New York: Harper, 1939. Print.
The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, Perry Miller and Thomas H. Thompson, eds. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 1963. Print.
Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, Harrison T. Meserole, ed. New York: New York UP, 1968. Print.
A Treasury of American Literature, Joe Lee David, John T. Frederick, Frank Luther Mott, et al., eds. Volume One. Chicago: Spencer, 1955. Print.
Twelve American Writers, William M. Gibson and George Arms, eds. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Print.
Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, Patrie Cowell, ed. Troy: Whitston: 1981. Print.
Writing New England: An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present, Andrew Delbanco, ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.
Other Works
Bennett, Bridget. “The Crisis of Restoration: Mary Rowlandson’s Lost Home.” Early American Literature 49 (2014): 327–56. Print.
Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Print.
Brückner, Martin. “The Critical Place of Empire in Early American Studies.” American Literary History 15 (2003): 809–21. Print.
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Gould, Philip. “The New Early American Anthology.” Review Essay. Early American Literature 38.2 (2003): 305–17. Print.
The Journals of Madam Knight and Rev. Mr. Buckingham. From the Original Manuscripts, Written in 1704 and 1710. New York: Wilder and Campbell, 1825. Print.
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Lauter, Paul. Canons and Contexts. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.
——, ed. Reconstructing American Literature. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist, 1983. Print.
Lockard, Joe and Jillian Sandell. “National Narratives and the Politics of Inclusion: Historicizing American Literature Anthologies.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8.2 (2008): 226–54. Print.
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Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative.” American Literature 19 (1947): 1–20. Print.
“Preface” to The Heath Anthology of American literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. 6th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009. Print.
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Roemer, Kenneth M., ed. “Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons.” Web. April 10, 2014.
Tabbi, Joseph. “Epic at the End of Empire.” Electronic Book Review December 7, 2011. Web. June 25, 2014.
White, Ed and Michael J. Drexler. “Colonial Studies.” American Literary History 16 (2004): 728–57. Print.
Wheatley, Phillis. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1966. Print.
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© 2016 Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola
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Derounian-Stodola, K.Z. (2016). Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy. In: Balkun, M.M., Imbarrato, S.C. (eds) Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_17
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