The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology

When I was in graduate school, too many years ago, the American colonial anthology in wide use was a fairly slender volume, beginning with John Smith and John Winthrop and ending with Ben Franklin and the playwright Royall Tyler.

What a sea‐change since then! After Janice Radway’s 1998 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, in which she decried the myth of an exceptional, unitary America, it was no longer legitimate to exclude material on the pre‐contact peoples, or the Spanish, Portugese and French explorers and conquerors. The early settlements in North, Central and South America by these diverse Europeans...