Ivy Schweitzer

A Different, More Complicated Bradstreet: Interview With Charlotte Gordon

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Charlotte Gordon to Anne Bradstreet studies. Her work has brought important and energizing popular attention to Bradstreet, and to early American research in general. Her book, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet (Little, Brown, 2005), is the first fully vocalized, fleshed out, and contextual biography of Anne Bradstreet. We have had an evolution of versions of the life of Bradstreet (e.g., White; Piercy) since John Woodbridge’s “Kind Reader,” which prefaced the 1650 The Tenth Muse, and which provided us with the first insights into Bradstreet’s writing habits in the context of her life as mother and wife:

Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (review)

minor quibbles with a work that provides great insight into the cycle by which folklore and custom become law and order. Crane has selected remarkable stories and pieced together an incredible array of detail from the available documents. One wonders how many records she had to read to get to these selected—and particularly juicy—ones. At the same time, the writing makes you forget that each of these tiny details (where on the street a house was, how old someone was at the time of her third child’s birth, how closely related one branch of a family was to another) was meticulously researched and documented. Crane has plumbed the depths of the archives—census and tax data, indictments, lists of judges and jurors, and newspaper and other published accounts—to flesh out the stories of these individuals and their communities. Contemporary handwringing frequently bemoans the lawsuithappy nature of American culture today; if anything, this book serves to show that such a legalistic predisposition is not new to the twentieth or twentyfirst centuries. As Crane notes, “Americans were keenly interested in and influenced by legalities” (2), and legal institutions had profound effects on the everyday lives of common people. Crane’s chapters show that “[p]eople appear to have been informed about what the law demanded of them, as well as their rights under the legal system they devised and lived by. They were also aware of the ways they could circumvent the law and even ignore it, should they choose to do so” (205). It really isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that Law and Order: Seventeenthand EighteenthCentury America would be a very entertaining and strangely familiar program.

American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (review)

enchanted space in London. Two black women enter, and Beaugard exclaims, ‘‘What are you two, Maids of Honour to the Queen of Pomonkey? And is this one of her Palaces?’’ (act ). I can turn to Johnson and Burling to see that The Atheist was never played in America, and then to Hutner to discover that London audiences in the s would understand an allusion to the Queen of Pamunkey. But why are black women assumed to be the Indian queen’s maids? Did this scene kill its potential for the American stage? On this topic and others about America and theater, I hope to see a great deal more very soon.

Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction

This study explores the relationships of black and white women in the context of contemporary southern fiction. It provides an overview of literary incarnations of friendship and examines how prevalent specific relationships have become in certain writers work.