Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century

Download Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351870793
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century by : Catherine Armstrong

Download or read book Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century written by Catherine Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first permanent English colony was established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and accounts of the new world started to arrive back on the English shores, English men and women have had a fascination with their transatlantic neighbours and the landscape they inhabit. In this excellent study, Catherine Armstrong looks at the wealth of literature written by settlers of the new colonies, adventurers and commentators back in England, that presented this new world to early modern Englanders. A vast amount of original literature is examined including travel narratives, promotional literature, sermons, broadsides, ballads, plays and journals, to investigate the intellectual links between mother-country and colony. Representations of the climate, landscape, flora and fauna of North America in the printed and manuscript sources are considered in detail, as is the changing understanding of contemporaries in England of the colonial settlements being established in both Virginia and New England, and how these interpretations affected colonial policy and life on the ground in America. The book also recreates the context of the London book trade of the seventeenth century and the networks through which this literature would have been produced and transmitted to readers. This book will be valuable to those with interests in colonial history, the Atlantic world, travel literature, and historians of early modern England and North America in general.

The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England

Download The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 0719098262
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (19 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England by : Kimberley Skelton

Download or read book The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England written by Kimberley Skelton and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment in terms of mobility, as motion became a dominant mode of articulating the world across discourses encompassing philosophy, political theory, poetry, and geography. From mid-century, the house and estate that had evoked staccato rhythms became triggers for mental and physical motion – evoking travel beyond England’s shores, displaying vistas, and showcasing changeable wall surfaces. Simultaneously, philosophers and other authors argued for the first time that, paradoxically, the blur of motion immobilised an inherently restless viewer into social predictability and so stability. Alternately feared and praised early in the century for its unsettling unpredictability, motion became the most certain way of comprehending social interactions, language, time, and the buildings that filtered human experience. At the heart of this narrative is the malleable sensory viewer, tacitly assumed in early modern architectural theory and history yet whose inescapable responsiveness to surrounding stimuli guaranteed a dependable world from the seventeenth century.

Landscape and Identity in North America's Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745

Download Landscape and Identity in North America's Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317108272
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Landscape and Identity in North America's Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745 by : Catherine Armstrong

Download or read book Landscape and Identity in North America's Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745 written by Catherine Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an analysis of textual representations of the American landscape, this book looks at how North America appeared in books printed on both sides of the Atlantic between the years 1660 and 1745. A variety of literary genres are examined to discover how authors described the landscape, climate, flora and fauna of America, particularly of the new southern colonies of Carolina and Georgia. Chapters are arranged thematically, each exploring how the relationship between English and American print changed over the 85 years under consideration. Beginning in 1660 with the impact of the Restoration on the colonial relationship, the book moves on to show how the expansion of British settlement in this period coincided with a dramatic increase in the production and consumption of the printed word and the further development of religious and scientific explanations of landscape change and climactic events. This in turn led to multiple interpretations of the American landscape dependent on factors such as whether the writer had actually visited America or not, differing purposes for writing, growing imperial considerations, and conflict with the French, Spanish and Natives. The book concludes by bringing together the three key themes: how representations of landscape varied depending on the genre of literature in which they appeared; that an author's perceived self-definition (as English resident, American visitor or American resident) determined his understanding of the American landscape; and finally that the development of a unique American identity by the mid-eighteenth century can be seen by the way American residents define the landscape and their relationship to it.

Writing American Indian Music

Download Writing American Indian Music PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : A-R Editions, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0895794942
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (957 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Writing American Indian Music by : Victoria Lindsay Levine

Download or read book Writing American Indian Music written by Victoria Lindsay Levine and published by A-R Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition explores the history of musical contact, interaction, and exchange between American Indians and Euramericans, as documented in musical transcriptions, notations, and arrangements. The volume contributes to an understanding of American music that reflects our cultural reality, depicting reciprocal influences among Native Americans, scholars, composers, and educators, and illustrating consequences of those encounters for American musical life in general. Culled from a published record of over 8,000 songs, the edition contains 116 musical examples reproduced in facsimile. Included in the volume are the earliest attempts to represent tribal music in European notation, archetypal transcriptions in the scholarly literature of ethnomusicology, and recent contributions by contemporary scholars. Some of the notations shown here inspired composers in search of a distinctively American musical idiom to write works based on American Indian melodies. Others captured the imagination of American school children, whose concept of cultural and musical identity came to be linked with American Indians. Indigenous notations, the work of native scholars and educators, and recent compositions by native composers working in the classical vein also appear in this volume. As a compendium of historic materials, the edition illustrates the development of Euramerican attitudes and approaches to American Indian musics, the infusion of native musics into American musical culture, and native responses to and participation in the enterprise.

Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629-1824

Download Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629-1824 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317180976
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629-1824 by : Cathy Rex

Download or read book Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629-1824 written by Cathy Rex and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the appropriations and revisions of Indian identity first carried out by Anglo-American engravers and later by early Anglo-American women writers, Cathy Rex shows the ways in which iconic images of Native figures inform not only an emerging colonial/early republican American identity but also the authorial identity of white women writers. Women such as Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female American, Rex argues, co-opted and revised images of Indianness such as those found in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and the numerous variations of Pocahontas’s image based on Simon Van de Passe’s original 1616 engraving. Doing so allowed them to posit their own identities and presumed superiority as American women writers. Sometimes ugly, occasionally problematic, and often patently racist, the Indian writings of these women nevertheless question the masculinist and Eurocentric discourses governing an American identity that has always had Indianness at its core. Rather than treating early American images and icons as ancillary to literary works, Rex places them in conversation with one another, suggesting that these well-known narratives and images are mutually constitutive. The result is a new, more textually inclusive perspective on the field of early American studies.

A Not-So-New World

Download A Not-So-New World PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812295455
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Not-So-New World by : Christopher M. Parsons

Download or read book A Not-So-New World written by Christopher M. Parsons and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay

Download John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1611485045
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay by : Kathryn N. Gray

Download or read book John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay written by Kathryn N. Gray and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of John Eliot’s mission to the Algonquian-speaking people of Massachusetts Bay, from his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1690. It explores John Eliot’s determination to use the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian, both in speech and in print, as a language of conversion and Christianity. The book analyzes the spoken words of religious conversion and the written transcription of those narratives; it also considers the Algonquian language texts and English language texts which Eliot published to support the mission. Central to this study is an insistence that John Eliot consciously situated his mission within a tapestry of contesting transatlantic and political forces, and that this framework had a direct impact on the ways in which Native American penitents shaped and contested their Christian identities. To that end, the study begins by examining John Eliot’s transatlantic network of correspondents and missionary-supporters in England, it then considers the impact of conversion narratives in spoken and written forms, and ends by evaluating the impact of literacy on praying Indian communities. The study maps the coalescence of different communities that shaped, or were shaped by, Eliot’s seventeenth-century mission.

Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space

Download Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vernon Press
ISBN 13 : 1648892868
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (488 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space by : Sotirios Triantafyllos

Download or read book Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space written by Sotirios Triantafyllos and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Topos in Utopia' examines early modern literary utopias' and intentional communities' social and cultural conception of space. Starting from Thomas More's seminal work, published in 1516, and covering a period of three centuries until the emergence of Enlightenment's euchronia, this work provides a thorough yet concise examination of the way space was imagined and utilised in the early modern visions of a better society. Dealing with an aspect usually ignored by the scholars of early modern utopianism, this book asks us to consider if utopias' imaginary lands are based not only on abstract ideas but also on concrete spaces. Shedding new light on a period where reformation zeal, humanism's optimism, colonialism's greed and a proto-scientific discourse were combined to produce a series of alternative social and political paradigms, this work transports us from the shores of America to the search for the Terra Australis Incognita and the desire to find a new and better world for us.

The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

Download The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.E/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century by : Francis Parkman

Download or read book The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century written by Francis Parkman and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America

Download Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143848318X
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America by : Lucianne Lavin

Download or read book Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America written by Lucianne Lavin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays by historians and archaeologists offers an introduction to the significant impact of Dutch traders and settlers on the early history of Northeastern North America, as well as their extensive and intensive relationships with its Indigenous peoples. Often associated with the Hudson River Valley, New Netherland actually extended westward into present day New Jersey and Delaware and eastward to Cape Cod. Further, New Netherland was not merely a clutch of Dutch trading posts: settlers accompanied the Dutch traders, and Dutch colonists founded towns and villages along Long Island Sound, the mid-Atlantic coast, and up the Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware River valleys. Unfortunately, few nonspecialists are aware of this history, especially in what was once eastern and western New Netherland (southern New England and the Delaware River Valley, respectively), and the essays collected here help strengthen the case that the Dutch deserve a more prominent position in future history books, museum exhibits, and school curricula than they have previously enjoyed. The archaeological content includes descriptions of both recent excavations and earlier, unpublished archaeological investigations that provide new and exciting insights into Dutch involvement in regional histories, particularly within Long Island Sound and inland New England. Although there were some incidences of cultural conflict, the archaeological and documentary findings clearly show the mutually tolerant, interdependent nature of Dutch-Indigenous relationships through time. One of the essays, by a Mohawk community member, provides a thought-provoking Indigenous perspective on Dutch–Native American relationships that complements and supplements the considerations of his fellow writers. The new archaeological and ethnohistoric information in this book sheds light on the motives, strategies, and sociopolitical maneuvers of seventeenth-century Native leadership, and how Indigenous agency helped shape postcontact histories in the American Northeast.

Settling the Good Land

Download Settling the Good Land PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004435212
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (44 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Settling the Good Land by : Agnès Delahaye

Download or read book Settling the Good Land written by Agnès Delahaye and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-13 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the settlement project of the Massachusetts Bay Company in early New England. this book offers a critical reading of the settler history of its first governor, John Winthrop.

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America

Download New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1631492152
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (314 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America by : Wendy Warren

Download or read book New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America written by Wendy Warren and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year Winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for Social History Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize "This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports. And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.

Advancing Empire

Download Advancing Empire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107118913
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Advancing Empire by : L. H. Roper

Download or read book Advancing Empire written by L. H. Roper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores seventeenth-century English overseas expansion, offering a unique interpretation of the history of the early modern English Empire.

The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley

Download The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438450990
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley by : Jaap Jacobs

Download or read book The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley written by Jaap Jacobs and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth introduction to the issues involved in the expansion of European interests to the Hudson River Valley, the cultural interaction that took place there, and the colonization of the region. Written in accessible language by leading scholars, these essays incorporate the latest historical insights as they explore the new world in which American Indians and Europeans interacted, the settlement of the Dutch colony that ensued from the exploration of the Hudson River, and the development of imperial and other networks which came to incorporate the Hudson Valley.

Global Crisis

Download Global Crisis PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300189192
Total Pages : 944 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Global Crisis by : Geoffrey Parker

Download or read book Global Crisis written by Geoffrey Parker and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

The Dutch Moment

Download The Dutch Moment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501706675
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Dutch Moment by : Wim Klooster

Download or read book The Dutch Moment written by Wim Klooster and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author draws on a dazzling variety of archival and printed sources.... The Dutch Moment is a signal contribution to the field.―Renaissance Quarterly In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World. The Dutch would not have been able to achieve military victories without the native alliances they carefully cultivated. Indeed, the Dutch Atlantic was quintessentially interimperial, multinational, and multiracial. At the same time, it was an empire entirely designed to benefit the United Provinces. The pivotal colony in the Dutch Atlantic was Brazil, half of which was conquered by the Dutch West India Company. Its brief lifespan notwithstanding, Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) had a lasting impact on the Atlantic world. The scope of Dutch warfare in Brazil is hard to overestimate—this was the largest interimperial conflict of the seventeenth-century Atlantic. Brazil launched the Dutch into the transatlantic slave trade, a business they soon dominated. At the same time, Dutch Brazil paved the way for a Jewish life in freedom in the Americas after the first American synagogues opened their doors in Recife. In the end, the entire colony eventually reverted to Portuguese rule, in part because Dutch soldiers, plagued by perennial poverty, famine, and misery, refused to take up arms. As they did elsewhere, the Dutch lost a crucial colony because of the empire’s systematic neglect of the very soldiers on whom its defenses rested. After the loss of Brazil and, ten years later, New Netherland, the Dutch scaled back their political ambitions in the Atlantic world. Their American colonies barely survived wars with England and France. As the imperial dimension waned, the interimperial dimension gained strength. Dutch commerce with residents of foreign empires thrived in a process of constant adaptation to foreign settlers’ needs and mercantilist obstacles.

After Identity

Download After Identity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271076569
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis After Identity by : Robert Zacharias

Download or read book After Identity written by Robert Zacharias and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, the field of Mennonite literature has been dominated by the question of Mennonite identity. After Identity interrogates this prolonged preoccupation and explores the potential to move beyond it to a truly post-identity Mennonite literature. The twelve essays collected here view Mennonite writing as transitioning beyond a tradition concerned primarily with defining itself and its cultural milieu. What this means for the future of Mennonite literature and its attendant criticism is the question at the heart of this volume. Contributors explore the histories and contexts—as well as the gaps—that have informed and diverted the perennial focus on identity in Mennonite literature, even as that identity is reread, reframed, and expanded. After Identity is a timely reappraisal of the Mennonite literature of Canada and the United States at the very moment when that literature seems ready to progress into a new era. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Ervin Beck, Di Brandt, Daniel Shank Cruz, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Royden Loewen, Jesse Nathan, Magdalene Redekop, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Paul Tiessen.