What are the legacies of American Puritanism? The answers might surprise you. Somewhat paradoxically, these legacies are somehow both nearly invisible in the contemporary United States and also ubiquitous. On one hand, there is very little evidence of the theology or polity of seventeenth-century New England Puritans visible in today’s religious or political culture. It would be difficult to find an extant church offering a semblance of the services the Puritans attended, and even churches that claim a link to this time are quick to emphasize their evolution. At the same time, “puritan” persists in our culture as a byword for everything that is more repressive and less sexually evolved than we are. For instance, activists who want more freedom for nudity and sexual expression on social media often blame puritans for these restrictions. This differentiation between a contemporary Us and a puritan Them creates space for caricature that opens up space for what I call “settler kitsch,” an array of cartoonish, caricatured images of the settlers of New England, impossible to take seriously with their big hats and funny shoes. At the same time, these cartoons obscure an actual cognizance of Puritans by concealing the violence inherent in the settler colonial projects of Pilgrims and Puritans. As such, the principal legacies of Puritanism today are #freethenipple and settler kitsch.

Where is the Pacific in colonial American literary studies? Nowhere, according to our anthologies, literary histories, syllabi, and scholarship, which all seem to agree that the Pacific enters American literary studies only well after the colonial period. This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on the colonial Pacific to suggest what it looks like, why it is important, and how we might begin to incorporate it into our literary histories. It insists on the inclusion of Indigenous literary and political histories from the Pacific and on recognizing the long and complicated intersection of these with Chinese and other Asian trade histories as well as with European empire and commerce. These contexts are crucial for shaping the recovery, integration, and understanding of Pacific texts into a global American literary history. Our literary anthologies and histories – and the narratives they implicitly or explicitly tell – need to reach into Indigenous, international, and multilingual colonial pasts. The story of America we currently tell and teach is a very different one than it would be if we included the colonial Pacific; this chapter provides some initial building blocks from which to construct a new, critical, transoceanic narrative for early American literary studies.

Racialized subjection in the English Atlantic continues to be associated overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, with Africans, in part because of the magnitude and colossal significance of African chattel slavery to the plantation complex in particular and to the institutions of capitalist modernity in general. To be sure, workforces in the Atlantic became increasingly Africanized in the eighteenth century. Yet laboring people in the early years of settlement were by no means monochromatic; rather, they were, in Gary Nash’s classic account, red, white, and black. In Barbados and other New World colonies, plantation societies were built on expropriated Native lands and the coerced labor of Indigenous and African peoples. This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extraliterary sources – plays, proto-ethnographic texts, the early novel, and pamphlets – to investigate the conjoined yet distinct histories of territorial dispossession and labor extraction. It argues that the continued expansion of plantation agriculture in the early Atlantic, supported by African chattel slavery, had, as its inevitable corollary, the diminution of Native American territorial sovereignty.

How might a close reading of the language of revolutionary-era anti-slavery petitions contribute to a broader understanding of the politics of the American founding? This chapter focuses on one of the earliest surviving examples of African American political writing, the petition submitted to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in January 1773, by an author named FELIX. Revolutionary republicans came to disparage the petitionary form, because it had failed to persuade King George to defend his colonial subjects. The petition’s conventional language of deference and its tendency to “pray” or plead rather than to demand or insist led many colonists to reject the form in favor of far more assertive declarations of individual and collective right. By reanimating the petition, however, African Americans like FELIX not only contributed to the work of anti-slavery agitation; they also, as this chapter suggests, registered resistance to some of the dominant political ideas of the republican revolution. Drawing on historical studies of the significance of the petition in the colonies as well as accounts of the petition’s key formal and rhetorical features, this chapter makes the case for a specifically African American contribution to the political discourse of the founding.

Most communications in early colonial America were not written down. Even if, following recent scholarly trends, we understand the Western notion of “writing” broadly – as including all forms of inscribed human communication – nonverbal exchanges still carry most of our human-to-human signals. How, then, do we study early American interactions between Natives and newcomers if so much of what we must rely upon as analysts goes unspoken? This chapter describes the methodological and ethical challenges of early colonial North American historiography based on other-than-linguistic evidence in three media domains: Indigenous media of the colonial era; human relations to and movement in landscape; and the environment as an agential force.

What is the literature of the Indigenous colonial Americas? Because Indigenous peoples remain under colonization and literary genres like the novel and poetry are settler colonial categories, answering this question is fraught. In response, this chapter considers Indigenous concepts of kinship and peoplehood as doing rather than being, and surveys Native literatures through genres of doing. Ranging across the American hemisphere from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, it surveys textual examples that record, narrate, map, teach, express, and survive. These genres of doing are not comprehensive nor should texts be taken to be unifunctional. Instead, genres of doing may aid readers in identifying and exploring cross-form, cross-temporal, and cross-cultural resonances while also attending to cultural and textual specificities. This holds true for considering Native texts from multiple traditions alongside each other but also in the case of Native and non-Native texts.

When most people think of early America, they imagine a geographical region that encompasses the present-day United States. Like previous chapters in this volume, the present chapter encourages a broader conception of the region by, in this case, illuminating the importance of the Caribbean as a physical space and as an idea in early American literature. The Caribbean was a battle ground for empire. Consequently, those texts written in and about the region can tell us a great deal about European exploration and settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, capitalism and modernity, colonial resistance, and the diasporic, migratory patterns of people, which are themes that pervade early American literature in general. This chapter, then, offers an overview of that literature, highlighting the literary contours of a Caribbean America. The discussion homes in on the anglophone Caribbean and its place within the literary imagination of English-language texts of early America and addresses three questions: How do English-language texts of early America imagine the Caribbean? How do we read those texts within the wider field of early American literature? And why does it matter?

Applying a science studies approach to early American literature means focusing on how early modern settler colonialism in the Americas, with all its violence and exploitation, was a knowledge-producing machine. Enslavers and colonizers stole the skills, labor, and resources from enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples, and in the process forged many of the empirical practices, forms of measurement and categorization, and stratification between types of expertise that we typically recognize as constituting scientific work. Research in early American literature investigates the complexity of particular representations of natural phenomena and traces their circulation within or against powerful narratives that organized culture. This shows how contemporary scientific understandings of natural phenomena are historically and culturally determined and calls attention to the settler colonial work scientific expertise can continue to do in the present and contributing to the project of imagining alternative uses for it. This chapter argues for an approach to reading nature in early American literature that is modeled on acts of translation rather than processes of decoding. This difference is as subtle as it is essential for opening up the present to simultaneous scrutiny as critics confront an archive produced by the violent structures of the past.

Can novels change the world, or must they merely inscribe, and thereby fortify, its injustices? Throughout a range of critical approaches, including new aesthetics, sexuality studies, book history, affect theory, environmental humanities, critical slavery studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, network theory, the spatial turn, world-systems, gender studies, network theory, health humanities, and more, tensions run high in early Americanist literary scholarship between a realist conviction that worlds create books and an equally resolute commitment to the possibility that books – especially fictions – create worlds. This chapter hopes to honor, rather than quiet, this critical ferment. To explain without explaining away will be its challenge. To create a place for those early American authors, meanwhile, who have not until recently been recognized in literary studies because their textual creations do not meet normative standards for book-length imaginative prose will be its sustaining goal.

Adam Roberts identifies the opposition between plain and excessive styles as a distinguishing feature in the history of science fiction. The chapter considers the rival origins of the genre in Verne and Wells and offers a comprehensive survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditions. Roberts tracks the history of a pared-down, plain style that often runs counter to the excess and scientific detail of the content and sets it alongside a competing, more ambitious, ‘literary’ prose style that has increasingly come into the ascendancy.

Michael D. Hurley’s chapter considers the many applications of the concept of style and pursues its historical fortunes across a range of writers. Although style has been variously configured and refigured, what is apparent is that the ideal of clarity, so frequently promoted by style guides and other textbooks, is not the only objective of style, especially not in literary fiction and non-fiction.

The chapter on sentences shows that the relations made possible by syntax between wording and timing, sequence and consequence, and experience and reflection create an unlimited range of possible effects at the level of the sentence. The chapter explores some of these effects, noting particularly the presence of competing impulses in single sentences, so that any sentence is a negotiation between rival forces and, in its fullest implication, a representation of the mixed conditions of human existence.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

This chapter shows that paragraphs are themselves an ‘expressive device’ and not simply a form of segmenting prose into semantically neutral units. The chapter draws on a history of paragraphs (which are alternatively linked to oral delivery and to logical organisation) and shows how paragraphs can contribute to various effects of expression, including tonal control.