The essays in this pathbreaking collection consider the significance of varied early American fragmentary genres and practices—from diaries and poetry, to almanacs and commonplace books, to sermons and lists, to Indigenous ruins and other material shards and fragments—often overlooked by critics in a scholarly privileging of the “whole.” Contributors from literary studies, book history, and visual culture discuss a host of canonical and non-canonical figures, from Edward Taylor and Washington Irving to Mary Rowlandson and Sarah Kemble Knight, offering insight into the many intellectual, ideological, and material variations of “form” that populated the early American cultural landscape. As these essays reveal, the casting of the fragmentary as aesthetically eccentric or incomplete was a way of reckoning with concerns about the related fragmentation of nation, society, and self. For a contemporary audience, they offer new ways to think about the inevitable gaps and absences in our cultural and historical archive.
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
Introduction: Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art 1 Matthew Pethers and Daniel Diez Couch
PA R T O N E: Partial Histories
1 Reading for Unreadability; or, Embracing the Gaps in Congregational Church Records 33 Lori Rogers-Stokes
2 “Textural Scholarship”: Susan Howe’s Mary Rowlandson 49 Marion Rust
3 “Composing My Resentments”: Process and Palimpsest in Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Journal of Madam Knight 76 Nicholas K. Mohlmann
4 Fragments, Scraps, and the Formalism of the Historical Imagination 95 Daniel Diez Couch
PA R T TWO: Fragmentary Communities
5 Reading Early American Almanacs: Imagining Unity in Parts and Pieces 117 Keri Holt
6 Lists and List-Makers of the African Atlantic Archive 151 John Saillant
7 Failed Periodicals, Forgotten Satires, and Alternative Forms of Dissent in Antebellum America 172 D. Berton Emerson
PA R T T H R E E: Visible Assemblages
8 The Early National Picturesque 199 Laurel V. Hankins
9 Visualizing the Incompleteness of “Mound-Builder” Ruins 220 Lisa West
10 Edward Taylor and the Art of Assemblage 249 Amy M. E. Morris
Notes on Contributors 275
Index 278
