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• Seventeenth-century literature: the wilderness. Andrew White ; John Hammond ; George Alsop
• Early eighteeneth-century literature: the planter. Ebenzer Cook ; William Parks ; Richard Lewis
• Mid-eighteenth-century literature: athe club. Jonas Green ; Alexander Hamilton ; James Sterling ; Thomas Bacon

• Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Introduction; 1. The Necessity of Language; Words Like Wooden Horses William Bradford and Thomas Morton; Double-Talk Renaissance and Reformed Traditions; Concealed Verbal Artistry Richard Mather and Edward Taylor; 2. The Winding Sheet of Meditative Verse; The Wrack of Mortal Poets Anne Bradstreet's Contemplations
• Unfolding the Twisting Serpent Edward Taylor's Meditation 1.19
• 3. Laughter and Death; All in Jest Nathaniel Ward's The Simple Cobler; Dissolving Stones Urian Oakes's Elegy on Thomas Shepard; 4. Breaking Verbal Icons.

• Nature, Reason, and Language Jonathan Edwards in ReactionFrom Something to Nothing to Everything Edwards's Early Sermons; 5. Islands of Meaning; Eighteenth-Century Allegory or Satire? Nathan Fiske's An Allegorical Description
• The Letter Killeth Edward Bellamy's To Whom This May Come
• Notes; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; W; Y; Z.

Puritan American writers faced a dilemma: they had an obligation to use language as a celebration of divine artistry, but they could not allow their writing to become an iconic graven image of authorial self-idolatry. In this study William Scheick explores one way in which William Bradford, Nathaniel Ward, Anne Bradstreet, Urian Oakes, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards mediated these conflicting imperatives. They did so, he argues, by creating moments in their works when they and their audience could hesitate and contemplate the central paradox of language: its capacity to intimate both concealed authorial pride and latent deific design. These ambiguous occasions served Puritan writers as places where the threat of divine wrath and the promise of divine mercy intersected in unresolved tension. By the nineteenth century the heritage of this Christlike mingling of temporal connotation and eternal denotation had mutated. A peculiar late eighteenth-century narrative by Nathan Fiske and a short story by Edward Bellamy both suggest that the binary nature of language exploited by their Puritan ancestors was still a vital authorial concern; but neither of these writers affirms the presence of an eternal denotative signification hidden within the conflicting historical contexts of their apparently allegorical language. For them, appreciation of the mystery of a divine revelation possibly concealed in words yielded to puzzlement over language itself, specifically over the inadequacy of language to signify more than its own instability of design. This book is a tightly focused study of an important aspect of Puritan American writers' use of language by one of the leading scholars in the field of early American literature.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Testing and testifying : the word, the other, and African American women writers
• "Sometimes by simile, a victory's won" : Lucy Terry Prince and Phillis Wheatley
• Equal men but true women : the post-revolution literature
• "Great liberty in the gospel" : Jarena Lee's religious experiences, life, and journal
• Gendered writing for promiscuous audiences : African American women's literature in the antebellum period
• Writing across the color line : Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the life of a slave girl
• Romance and scandal in a postbellum slave narrative : Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the scenes
• Doers of the word : the reconstruction poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
• Confrontation and community in Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert's The house of bondage
• "A woman question and a race problem" : The Black woman's era.

"I am very impressed by Frances Smith Foster's "Written by Herself", a work of thorough scholarship, judicious criticism, and original insights...This book will confirm her leadership among those working in this ever-expanding field."- N William L. Andrews. "Written by Herself' is the first comprehensive cultural history of literature by African American women prior to the twentieth century. Beginning with the earliest extant writings, Frances Smith Foster frames her textual analyses within the writers' social and literary contexts. These works stem from literary traditions and cultural interventions received, invented, or modified by writers who defied the accepted literary prerogatives of their race, gender, and class. Their literature was argument, designed to correct or to instruct an audience often ignorant about or even hostile to Black women. Adapting existing genres and literary techniques, these authors developed a form of literary signification and saw themselves as part of a continuing literary tradition. Foster begins with the oral histories of Alice, a slave born in Philadelphia in 1686. She continues with political activists Maria W. Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper, precursors of the African American women's literary tradition that included Lucy Terry Price, Phyllis Wheatley, Jarena Lee, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)