Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire

Front Matter....Pages i-x
Introduction....Pages 1-8
Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire....Pages 9-32
Ungendering Empire: Catalina De Erauso and the Performance of Masculinity....Pages 33-46
Creole Civic Pride and Positioning “Exceptional” Black Women....Pages 47-61
Imposing Order: Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal and the Anglo-American Empire....Pages 63-75
The Midwife’s Calling: Martha Ballard’s Diary and the Empire of Medical Knowledge in the Early Republic....Pages 77-91
The Birth Pangs of the American Mother: Puritanism, Republicanism, and the Letter-Journal of Esther Edwards Burr....Pages 93-107
Empire and the Pan-Atlantic Self in The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield....Pages 109-122
“The Fever and the Fetters”: an Epidemiology of Captivity and Empire....Pages 123-139
Women Left Behind: Female Loyalism, Coverture, and Grace Growden Galloway’s Empire of Self....Pages 141-155
“Solitary, Neglected, Despised”: Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality....Pages 157-170
The Woman of Colour and Black Atlantic Movement....Pages 171-185
New World Roots: Transatlantic Fictions, Creole Marriages, and Women’s Cultivation of Empire in the Americas....Pages 187-199
Catharine Brown’s Body: Missionary Spiritualization and Cherokee Embodiment....Pages 201-214
Territorial Agency: Negotiations of Space and Empire in the Domestic Violence Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston....Pages 215-227
“Her Book the Only Hope She Had”: Self and Sovereignty in the Narratives of Ann Carson....Pages 229-247
Bodies of Work: Early American Women Writers, Empire, and Pedagogy....Pages 249-266
Back Matter....Pages 267-286