In the Neighborhood: Women's Publication in Early America

Review With its focus on ‘relational publications,’ the book challenges standard accounts of eighteenth-century print culture, according to which men engaged with print to build the new nation and shape the publics that became a key space for defining identity.""—Kelly Wisecup, author of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013)""A compelling work of scholarship, In the Neighborhood stands to make a substantial, lasting contribution to early American literature and to all the conversations in which it is engaged, from Native American history to African American poetry, to political diplomacy, religious expression, and autobiographical writing in early America.""—Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast Product Description In this compelling and original book, Caroline Wigginton reshapes our understanding of early American literary history. Overturning long-standing connections between the male-dominated print culture of pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers and the transformative ideas that instigated the American Revolution, Wigginton explores how women’s “relational publications”—circulated texts, objects, and performances—transformed their public and intimate worlds. She argues that Native, black, and white women’s interpersonal “publications” revolutionized the dynamics of power and connection in public and private spaces, whether those spaces were Quaker meeting houses, Creek talwas, trading posts, burial grounds, or the women’s own “neighborhoods.”Informed by deep and rich archival research, Wigginton’s case studies explore specific instances of “relational publication.” The book begins with a pairing of examples—the statement a grieving Lenape mother made through a wampum belt and the political affiliations created when a salon hostess shared her poetry. Subsequent chapters trace a history of women’s publication practice, including a Creek woman’s diplomatic and legal procession-spectacles in the colonial Southeast, a black mother’s expression of protest in Newport, Rhode Island, and the resulting evangelical revival, Phillis Wheatley’s elegies that refigured neighborhoods of enslaved and free Bostonians, and a Quaker woman’s pious and political commonplace book in Revolutionary Philadelphia. - See more at: http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/neighborhood#sthash.ThjvNHdr.dpuf About the Author Caroline Wigginton is assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi, USA.