Early American Writings brings together a wide range of writings from the era of colonization of the Americas through the period of confederation in North America and the formation of the new United States of America. The anthology includes materials representing cultures indigenous to the Americas as well as writings by British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Swedish, German, African, and African American peoples in America during the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. With more than 170 writers included, the collection represents the works known and admired in the writers' own day, illustrates the diversity of interests and peoples depicted in those writings, and demonstrates the range of cross-cultural references early American readers experienced. The breadth of the collection provides readers with a fuller understanding of the backdrop for what is known as "American" culture today, in all its diversity. Early American Writings includes several original translations and features more poetry than any other anthology in the field. Each section covers a different period of colonization and is introduced by extensive commentary. All selections have been carefully annotated to help students place the writings in their cultural and regional contexts. Ideal for courses in early/colonial American literature and culture, colonial American studies, American studies, and American history, Early American Writings gives students an unprecedented look into the diverse and fascinating culture of early America.

Drawing materials from journals and diaries, political documents and religious sermons, prose and poetry, Giles Gunn's anthology provides a panoramic survey of early American life and literature—including voices black and white, male and female, Hispanic, French, and Native American. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions—imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively—played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. These texts vary widely: some are canonical, others archival; some literary, others scientific; some polemical, others simply documentary. As a whole, they recreate important mental mappings and cartographies, and they reveal how diverse populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their nation as occupying the American landscape. Focusing on place-specific, local writing published before 1860, Mapping Region in Early American Writing examines a period often overlooked in studies of regional literature in America. More than simply offering a prehistory of regionalist writing, these essays offer new ways of theorizing and studying regional spaces in the United States as it grew from a union of disparate colonies along the eastern seaboard into an industrialized nation on the verge of overseas empire building. They also seek to amplify lost voices of diverse narratives from minority, frontier, and outsider groups alongside their more well-known counterparts in a time when America’s landscapes and communities were constan

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

An outstanding collection of original critical essays by distinguished specialists, this book is both a chronological survey of nearly 200 years of American literature and an exciting reappraisal of the major figures of that period. Includes works from Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, William Bryd, Anne Bradstreet, William Bradford, and others.

Organized primarily in terms of genre, this handbook includes original research on key concepts, as well as analysis of interesting texts from throughout colonial America. Separate chapters are devoted to literary genres of great importance at the time of their composition that have been neglected in recent decades.