Reuben and Rachel
Susanna Haswell Rowson, a popular and prolific writer, actress, and educator in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a truly transatlantic life and career, moving twice from England to America and publishing extensively in both countries. A transatlantic sensibility informs her fictionalized “history” of America, Reuben and Rachel, which traces ten generations of…
Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom
As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an earnest case that women be accorded the rights guaranteed to men, playfully turning sexual hierarchies on their head: “Women were born for universal sway; / Men to adore, be silent,…
Kelroy
Kelroy, a nearly-forgotten 1812 novel by Rebecca Rush, combines the refinement of the novel of manners with the Gothic novel’s hidden evil to tell the story of the star-crossed lovers Emily Hammond and the romantic Kelroy, whose romance is doomed by the machinations of Emily’s mother. Set in the elite world of Philadelphia’s Atlantic Rim…
American Literature
AMERICAN LITERATURE The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813) The Female American, Second Edition (1767) Unca Eliza Winkfield Common Sense (1776) Thomas Paine Rights of Man (1791) Thomas Paine The Age of Reason (1794) Thomas Paine Emma Corbett (1781) Samuel Jackson Pratt Letters from an American Farmer (1782) Hector St. John De Crèvecoeur (BAAL Edition) The Interesting…
The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820
About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…