Read more
This collection maps the significance of fragmentary forms in early American literature and culture from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century.
The Part and the Whole recovers the distinct aesthetics of the incomplete, retelling the story of American culture by reorienting our collective understanding toward texts and objects that have often been critically ignored.
List of contents
Introduction: Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diez Couch
Part I – Partial Histories
Chapter 1: Reading for Unreadability; or, Embracing the Gaps in Congregational Church Records
Lori Rogers-Stokes
Chapter 2: Textural Scholarship: Susan Howe’s Mary Rowlandson
Marion Rust
Chapter 3: ‘Composing my resentments’: Process and Palimpsest in Sarah Kemble Knight’s
The Journal of Madam Knight Nicholas K. Mohlmann
Chapter 4: Fragments, Scraps, and the Formalism of the Historical Imagination
Daniel Diez Couch
Part II – Fragmentary Communities
Chapter 5: Reading Early American Almanacs: Imagining Unity in Parts and Pieces
Keri Holt
Chapter 6: Lists and List-Makers of the African Atlantic Archive
John Saillant
Chapter 7: Failed Periodicals, Forgotten Satires, and Alternative Forms of Dissent in Antebellum America
D. Berton Emerson
Part III – Visible Assemblages
Chapter 8: The Early National Picturesque
Laurel Hankins
Chapter 9: Visualizing the Incompleteness of ‘Mound-Builder’ Ruins
Lisa West
Chapter 10: Edward Taylor and the Art of Assemblage
Amy Morris
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
MATTHEW PETHERS is an associate professor of American intellectual and cultural history at the University of Nottingham in the UK. He is the editor of
The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing and is currently coediting volume two of
The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown (Bucknell University Press).
DANIEL DIEZ COUCH is an associate professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, where he teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. He is the author of
American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic.
