This essay tracks relations between Laurence Sterne's sonorous prose and his discussions of time in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), identifying a novelistic technique of rhythmic narration geared to represent experiential temporality. I call this technique sonorous duration, and I demonstrate how it conveys a pulsating embodied experience shared by intradiegetic communities as well as by readers. After giving a brief account of early musicology and eighteenth-century elocutionary treatises to indicate the cultural context in which Sterne develops his notions of rhythm and duration, I offer close readings of key scenes in Tristram Shandy that exemplify a novelistic interest in sonority as a means for representing shared and embodied temporal experience. In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as Gérard Genette and Garrett Stewart.

This essay considers the poetry of the juvenile author Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), largely unstudied today but well known throughout the nineteenth century. Kirke White's work provides an example of the importance to juvenile writing of prolepsis—a trope that yokes immediacy to the future, employing a range of strategies including both anticipation and retrospection. Robert Southey's edition of Kirke White's Remains, coming on the heels of Southey and Joseph Cottle's edition of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), consolidated juvenile writing into a recognizable tradition. Taking young Romanticera writers seriously now helps us recover how many young people published and how actively their writing was discussed. Romanticism's relation to juvenility can shape new hypotheses about literary practice and offer alternative understandings of tradition: the juvenile tradition, through a proleptic sense of its own immanence, anticipates its future critical neglect but indicates the retrospection and reinterpretation that will someday remedy it.

After showing that nine percent of William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects of Running, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just as Running prolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another.

Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne This essay examines the role of flânerie in Ralph Werther's 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne. In his everyday male existence, Werther lived a life of self-alienation. Strolls through urban slums in search of same-sex pickups, however, allowed him to become the woman he felt himself to be at his core. Critical assessments of the memoir largely overlook his preferred model of femininity, which derived from Victorian-era assumptions that women were, psychologically and morally, little more than children. Autobiography shows that flânerie was an ontology built on a paradox, for just as the flâneur's static identity consists of constant movement, Werther based his identity on the notion that childhood, itself transitional and peripatetic, was the destination of Victorian womanhood. By aligning flânerie with Victorian womanhood we might better understand how the latter is not antithetical to modern notions of sexuality but is the foundation on which the parameters of modern sexuality were constructed.

On 14 october 1492, on the island that he had just named San Salvador, Christopher Columbus Seized Seven TaÍno indians to serve as translators. The abduction was clearly an act of significant forethought, registering Columbus's intention that these interpreters “inquire and inform … about things in these parts” (Columbus, “Tetter” 118)—a first step toward the subjugation of all the inhabitants of San Salvador, who might one day be “taken to Castile or held captive” on the island (Columbus, Diario 75). The taking of these indigenous translators has been no less momentous for contemporary scholarship, perhaps especially in early modern English and American literary studies: in the year of the Columbian quincentenary, Stephen Greenblatt memorably called it “the primal crime in the New World … committed in the interest of language” (24); Eric Cheyfitz concurs that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104). Yet the concept of translation as a wholly imperial instrument, as commonplace in Columbus's day as in our own, has limited our thinking in important ways (Adorno, “Polemics” 20). As ethnohistorians and literary critics alike have suggested, the interpretive sway of the “linguistic colonialism” model can obscure as much about its Native objects as it reveals about the purported discursive complexity of its European subjects.

Is there a new “religious turn” in early american studies? or do declensions and revivals in scholarly attention to Religious matters suggest something about how religion and spirituality are lived? Witness an episode from the life of Olaudah Equiano, as recorded in his Interesting Narrative (1789), one of the new classics of early American literary study. It is October 1773, and the twenty-eight-year-old Equiano finds himself once again home in London. London, of course, is home in name only. Where is home for Equiano, really? Is it Igbo West Africa, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, London, or the black Atlantic itself? Did Equiano himself even know?

In 1776 the russian merchant grigor ivanovich shelikhov outfitted a ship bound from the siberian peninsula of kamchatka to the Aleutian Islands, which dot the sea at the westernmost reach of the North American continent. The expedition would hunt sea otters for trade in China, where the pelts fetched a high price. The same year nearly two hundred Spanish colonists arrived at the presidio in Monterey after a six-month journey from present-day southern Arizona. The expedition, led by Juan Bautista de Anza, aimed to populate northern California as part of Spain's efforts to resist encroachment from the north by Russian merchants like Shelikhov. Meanwhile, also in 1776, the explorer James Cook left England for the South Pacific in Britain's continuing attempt to rival France's scientific discoveries and access to potential trade goods in Asia. Throughout the European Atlantic, publications and translations of Cook's final travel narrative circulated details of the profitable trans-Pacific fur trade that until this point had largely been enjoyed by the Russians. Together, the Shelikhov, Anza, and Cook expeditions illustrate inter-European competition for resources and trade in the eighteenth-century Pacific while also suggesting the extraordinary transcultural, intercontinental, and multilingual reach of those encounters—including exchanges between several European nations (such as Russia, Spain, England, France), a variety of indigenous peoples (including Aleuts, Tlingits, Haidas, Ohlones, Tahitians, Hawaiians), and the inhabitants of and visitors to Canton (among them Chinese merchants and laborers, foreign traders from many European nations, and sailors and slaves from the Philippines, India, and other regions of Asia).

It's time for a pop quiz. you have ten minutes. (is your heart racing? take a deep breath.)

What major events in American literature and American history took place in and around the following years?

(1) 1789

(2) 1800

(3) 1820

(4) 1830

There is not only an existential poignancy but also an intellectual piquancy to the 1950 suicide note of F. O. Matthiessen, one of the founders of American studies: “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective” (“F. O. Matthiessen”). Matthiessen attributed his fateful decision to a situation—the Cold War—in which it increasingly seemed difficult to assert credibly and pursue effectively a socialist agenda without being presumed or pressured to hold commitments to materialism, atheism, and secularism. The dominant narrative of American studies is that the Cold War gave the field its life—the ideological impetus and institutional infrastructure to produce and peddle a sophisticated version of American exceptionalism (Radway 47-49; Wise 308-12). But Matthiessen's tragic case suggests instead that the Cold War may have killed American studies, at least a possible version of it. Matthiessen's fatal dilemma, I want respectfully to suggest, might instruct us how to reconstruct the history and future of a field whose “bread-and-butter concerns” have always included religion (Stein and Murison 1; cf. Modern). Matthiessen's political credentials as a socialist were bona fide, and his intellectual inclinations were toward deep historicist analysis, but he couldn't commit to Marxism, despite his frank acknowledgment of its indispensable contribution not only to intellectual culture but also to his own thinking. Clearly, personal religious reasons played a role—“I am a Christian, not through upbringing but by conviction, and I find any materialism inadequate” (Matthiessen, “Education” 180). But I want to underscore Matthiessen's intellectual objections, which arose from the evidence of his historical inquiry into American literature and culture. That is to say, I want to distinguish between how his theological convictions may have prejudiced him against Marxism's secularist teleology and how his scholarly investigation of American literature and culture raised legitimate questions about Marxism's implicit secularization narrative. In reviews of the Marxist literary histories of his Americanist colleagues V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Matthiessen complained of their inability to comprehend what he called “the main development of religious idealism from Edwards through the transcendental movement” and “the strain of affirmation of the ideal that runs from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Responsibilities 187, 195). The secularist premises of Marxist analysis—at least in the crude form espoused by Calverton and Hicks—seemed to Matthiessen blunt instruments with which to accomplish deep understanding of the pronounced “religious idealism” of American literature and culture.

La Gracia Triunfante en la vida de catharina tegakovita (“Grace triumphant in the life of catherine tekakwitha”), an account of the miraculous life of Kateri Tekakwitha, an Iroquois Indian from New France, traversed language and space to be published in Mexico City, New Spain, in 1724. Juan de Urtassum, a Basque Navarran Jesuit who had spent many years in Mexico, translated his fellow Jesuit Pierre Cholonec's hagiographic text from its original French (first published in Paris in 1717). Two appendixes accompanied the translation. In the first, a learned theological apology, the Mexican cleric Juan Castorena y Urúsa extolled the piety of indigenous women whom he deemed fit to be nuns; the second consisted of short narratives detailing the exemplary lives of New Spanish indigenous women. Urtassum and Castorena compiled the volume in order to advocate for the foundation of convents for indigenous women, presenting Tekakwitha's piety as evidence of indigenous women's capacity for Christian virtue (Díaz, Indigenous Writings 56; Greer, “Iroquois Virgin” 237). While Tekakwitha's sanctity helped Urtassum's case, his knowledge of and indeed interest in her provenance were scant. He locates the Iroquois Nation (the “Provincia de los Iraqueses”) on the northern frontier of New Spain (today's New Mexico), where indigenous groups had resisted Spanish attempts at colonization and evangelization for centuries. He “domesticates” the distant Iroquois for the New Spanish reader, comparing them with the Araucanian Indians of Chile, whose bravery Alonso de Ercilla immortalized in his epic poem La Araucana and who, though geographically distant from Mexico, seemed familiar through the Spanish colonial condition they shared with Urtassum's readers. In a telling moment, in the dedication to his patron that precedes the translation, Urtassum refers to “todo este emispherio” (“this entire hemisphere”). It is clear, however, that this reference encompasses only Spanish imperial possessions, including the recently founded California missions. The distant Iroquois Nation, located in geographically indistinct New France, does not figure in this geopolitical economy, nor do other American territories in the possession of rival imperial powers.

Across several of his influential anthologies of american literature, rufus griswold—nineteenth-century anthologist, poet, and erstwhile editor of Edgar Allan Poe—offers conflicting measures of what we now call early American literature. In The Prose Writers of America, for example, which first appeared in 1847 and later went into multiple editions, Griswold offers a familiar and currently derided set of parameters for this corpus of writing. In his prefatory remarks, dated May 1847, he explains that he has chosen not to include “the merely successful writers” who precede him. Although success might appear a high enough bar to warrant inclusion, he emphasizes that he has focused on writers who “have evinced unusual powers in controlling the national mind, or in forming the national character …” (5). This emphasis on what has been nationally consequential echoes other moments in Prose Writers, as well as paratextual material in his earlier The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and his Female Poets of America (1848). In his several miniature screeds condemning the lack of international copyright, as well as the consequent flooding of the American market with cheap reprints, Griswold explains the “difficulties and dangers” this lack poses to “American literature”: “Injurious as it is to the foreign author, it is more so to the American [people,] whom it deprives of that nationality of feeling which is among the first and most powerful incentives to every feat of greatness” (Prose Writers 6). In The Poets and Poetry of America, he similarly complains that America's “national tastes and feelings are fashioned by the subject of kings; and they will continue so to be, until [there is] an honest and political system of reciprocalcopyright …” (v). Even in The Female Poets of America, the subject of which one might think would change the nature of this conversation, Griswold returns to the national project, examining the significance of women writers for it. He cites the fact that several of the poets included in this volume have written from lives that were “no holydays of leisure” but defined rather by everything from “practical duties” to the experience of slavery. He also responds to those carping “foreign critics” who propose that “our citizens are too much devoted to business and politics to feel interest in pursuits which adorn but do not profit”; these home-laboring women writers, he argues, may end up being the source of that which is most genuinely American and most correctly poetic: “Those who cherish a belief that the progress of society in this country is destined to develop a school of art, original and special, will perhaps find more decided indications of the infusion of our domestic spirit and temper in literature, in the poetry of our female authors, than in that of our men” (8). As it turns out, even women poets are held to the standard of national self-expression and national self-realization; the surprise lies only in the fact that they live up to this standard.

A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

As a gift for his baptism in london, in february 1759, olaudah equiano records that he received a copy of Bishop Thomas Wilson's Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians (1740 [78]). The book's preface proclaimed the tract suitable for both “the Indians … a tractable People” and “[t]he very Hottentots, who are supposed to be the dullest of Mankind” (v, ix). At this point in his life story, Equiano has moved beyond the now famous “talking book” trope that marks the earlier sections of his autobiography to engage an emergent body of printed materials that were intended to speak to an interethnic cohort of potential Christian converts throughout the British Atlantic world.