Early America and the Modern Imagination

Patrick M. Erben is Professor of English at the University of West Georgia, USA. He is the author of A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (2013) and co-edited The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader (2019). Erben is a past president of the Society of Early Americanists and currently serves on the editorial board for Early American Literature. Rebecca L. Harrison is Professor of English at the University of West Georgia, USA. She is the co-editor of the Eudora Welty Review and President of the Eudora Welty Society. Her books include Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez (2013), Teaching, Pedagogy, and Learning: Fertile Ground for Campus and Community Innovations (2017) and Revitalizing Classrooms: Innovations and Inquiry Pedagogies in Practice (2017).

This book is both brilliant and necessary. Each chapter links a deep knowledge of the past to its modern redeployments in contemporary media. In doing so, the book makes a powerful case for the humanities, explaining public memory and showing how important it is for literary scholars to study it. A vital project, and a terrific book.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsNotes on ContributorsScripting the Past in the Present: Early America and the Modern Imaginary—An IntroductionPatrick M. Erben and Rebecca L. HarrisonPart I. Graphic Novels and Gaming: New Modalities and Historical RepresentationSection Overview1. Ghost River’s Restorative Fiction: Prioritizing Indigenous Pasts and PresentsWill Fenton and Katelyn Lucas2. Simulating Sovereignty: Alternative History, Video Games, and the HaudenosauneeHarry J. Brown3. Learning through Looking: Early American History and Race in Contemporary African American Graphic NovelsOliver ScheidingPart II. Women in Film: Gender, Consent, and RepresentationSection Overview4. More Authentic Yet Less Accurate: The Challenges of Depicting Women in Early American Film and TV AdaptationsStacey Dearing5. “Check her for marks!”: Teaching Bodily Consent and Autonomy through the Salem Witch Crisis Documents and Netflix’s Fear Street: 1666Danielle Cofer6. Sex Education: Teaching Revolutionary Constructs of Womanhood through AMC’s TurnPatrick M. Erben and Cryslin LedbetterPart III. Staging the Nation: From Theater to TelevisionSection Overview7. Performing, Remembering, and Reiterating: Early America on StageShira Lurie8. Aaron Posner’s JQA as Layered History: Promoting Aesthetic-Historical Reflection in a Texas Theatre’s ProductionSarah Ruffing Robbins9. Ted Lasso and Early American IdentityAnne Roth-ReinhardtPart IV. Grammars of Colonial ViolenceSection Overview10. “The Truth is Much Different”: Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s Literary Lives and the (Re)Production of Colonial ViolenceKirsten Iden11. African Cinema on American SlaverySteven W. Thomas12. Epistolary Writing and the Afterlife of Letters from a Woman of ColorLisa VandenbosscheIndex