Ivy Schweitzer – författare

Compiled in response to emerging transnational perspectives in American Studies, this comprehensive and imaginative anthology brings together a rich variety of works of colonial literature from across the Americas, covering the period from first contact, through to settlement and the emergence of national identities, with an emphasis on the American Revolutionary period.

In The Work of Self-Representation Ivy Schweitzer examines early American poetry through the critical lens of gender. Her concern is not the inclusion of female writers into the canon; rather, she analyzes how the metaphors of ""woman"" and ""feminine"" function in Puritan religious and literary discourse to represent both the ""otherness"" of spiritual experience and the ways in which race and class function to keep the ""other"" in marginalized positions. Schwetizer argues that gender was for seventeenth-century new England -- and still is today -- a basic and most politically charged metaphor for the differences that shape identity and determine cultural position. To glimpse the struggle between gender ideology and experience, Schweitzer provides close readings of the poetry of four New Englanders writing between the Great Migration and the first wave of the Great Awakening: John Fiske, Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, and Roger Williams. Schweitzer focuses exclusively on lyric poetry, she says, because a first-person speaker wrestling with the intricacies of individual consciousness provides fruitful ground for exploring the politics of voice and identity and especially problems of authority, intertextuality, and positionality. Fiske and Taylor define the orthodox tradition, and Bradstreet and Williams in different ways challenge it. Her treatment of the familiar poetry of Bradstreet and Taylor is solidly grounded in historical and literary scholarship yet suggestive of the new insights gained from a gender analysis, while discussions of Fiske and Williams bring their little-known lyric work to light. Taken together, these poets' texts illustrate the cultural construction of a troubled masculinity and an idealized, effaced femininity implicit in the Puritan notion of redeemed subjectivity, and constitute a profoundly disturbing and resilient part of our Puritan legacy.

Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of ""perfect"" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.

This broad introduction to Colonial American literatures brings out the comparative and transatlantic nature of the writing of this period and highlights the interactions between native, non-scribal groups, and Europeans that helped to shape early American writing. Situates the writing of this period in its various historical and cultural contexts, including colonialism, imperialism, diaspora, and nation formation. Highlights interactions between native, non-scribal groups and Europeans during the early centuries of exploration. Covers a wide range of approaches to defining and reading early American writing. Looks at the development of regional spheres of influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Serves as a vital adjunct to Castillo and Schweitzer’s ‘The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology’ (Blackwell Publishing, 2001).