Christine Daniels

About the Book

A Tale of Two Masters, of the Jade's Revenge takes the trials of two seventeenth-century Maryland planters, both accused of murdering a servant, to explore the rich and often startling alien legan, social and cultural landscapes of early colonial America. By interweaving both gripping historical narrative and incisive scholarship, Christine Daniels tells two stories that will reveal a great deal about the early colonial household, including the legal and social obligations of masters and dependants, acceptable and non acceptable forms of violence, patriarchy, and gender relations.

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Susan Castillo

About the Book

This pioneering study examines the extraordinary proliferation of polyphonic or "multi-voiced" texts in the three centuries following the first contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas. These plays, printed dialogues, travel narratives, and lexicographic studies, in English, Spanish and French, reverberate with a cacophony of voices as both European and indigenous writers of the early Americas stage the interaction of their cultures.

Paying particular attention to performance and performativity in the texts of the early colonial world, Susan Castillo asks:
- why vast numbers of polyphonic and performative texts emerged in the Early Americas
- how these texts enabled explorers, settlers, and indigenous groups to come to terms with radical differences in language, behavior, and cultural practices
- how dialogues, plays, and paratheatrical texts were used to impose or resist ideologies and cultural norms
- how performance and polyphony allowed Europeans and Americans to debate exactly what it meant to be European or American or, in some cases, both.

Tracing the dynamic enactment of (often conflictive) encounters between differing local narratives, Castillo presents polyphonic texts not only as a singularly useful tool for exploring what initially seemed inexpressible or for conveying controversial ideas, but also, crucially, as the site where cultural difference is negotiated. Offering unprecedented linguistic and historical range, through the analysis of texts from Spain, France, New Spain, Peru, Brazil, New England and New France, her volume is an important advance in the study of early American literature and the writings of colonial encounter.

Table of Contents

Scott Slawinski

About the Book  
This book explores images of single and married men in C.B. Brown's Monthly Magazine and concludes that Brown used his periodical as a vehicle for validating bachelorhood as a viable alternative form of masculinity.

Series: Studies in American Popular History and Culture 
Area: History, Literature
List Price: $65.00
ISBN: 0415971780
Publication Date: 1/7/2005
Pages: 144 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Binding(s): Cloth