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3 - American women's writing in the colonial period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Kirstin Wilcox
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Kirstin Wilcox
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, and Sarah Kemble Knight: every recent textbook covering the historical span of American literature includes at least two of those three names among its colonial-era writers. Anne Bradstreet (1612–72), an immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, published The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, a collection of her poetry, in 1650, and a posthumous collection with new material in 1678. Mary Rowlandson (1637–1711) spent nearly three months of captivity with the Narragansett tribe in 1676 before returning to her settlement in Lancaster, Massachusetts; her book describing these events, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), is the most well-known instance of the captivity narrative genre. Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727) kept a journal of her journey from Boston to New York in 1704–5, describing in lively and humorous detail her adventures on the road, an account first published in 1825 as The Journal of Madam Knight.

The isolated voices of these three writers long sustained the myths that (1) early American women wrote little and (2) “early America” was the same thing as the present-day northeastern United States. In the past few decades, those myths have been overturned. Scholars of women's literature have identified important women's writing spanning the full range of New World experience, levels of literacy, social position, wealth, and national orientation. At the same time, those working in post-colonial and hemispheric studies have resisted the teleology of later historical developments and so redefined the terms “colonial,” “American,” and “writing”.

Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 55 - 73
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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