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Cargando... Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early Americapor Kathleen Donegan
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I have to say that this book was hard for me to start and continue. It was somewhere around the point of the Jamestown colonists that it began to flow better for me, and it really grabbed my interest more. What I really liked about this was the insights into what really shaped the individual, and society as a whole, of the early colonists. It really was a mindset driven by stress and horrors. While I understand the lineage leading to the chapter in Barbados and sugar production, but it just felt out of place to me. I think a final chapter as a summation or overview that Roanoke and the confrontations in Jamestown had on the subsequent colonization efforts would have been much better suited and appreciated. The afterward is actually one of my favorite reads in this book due to the authors narrative, explanation, and discussions on interpretation from the original writings. An unconventional look at early English colonial settlements, through the lens of the catastrophes that very often shaped their early years. The chapters on Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth are excellently done, relying on close readings of atypical sources and making truly novel arguments about how the brutal conditions faced by the early settlers played a key role in the colonies' development. The fourth chapter, on Barbados, wasn't as successful for me, though I was glad it was included. Tough to read at times, but an excellent addition to the shelves of early American historians. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Pertenece a las seriesEarly American Studies (2013)
The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis ?both experiential and existential ?at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)973History and Geography North America United StatesClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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I have nothing against interdisciplinary work per se (I have a graduate degree in comparative literature, where one does nothing more than wear divers academic hats, none of them quite fitting right), but Misery is structured neither as history nor as a literary reading of specific historical documents. The author explains: "As a reader of the texts of early settlement, I am interested in both literary exegesis and historical recovery, and throughout this study I use the tools of both literary criticism and narrative history" (13).
But the texts take a back seat. (Ostensibly they are written in the English language, making them fair game for a professor of English, but I digress). Instead of giving a literary reading of one or more texts specific to her topic, Donegal structures the book into four separate seasons of misery--Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados--and it is these seasons or epochs themselves that are "read," with various texts such as George Percy's Trewe Relacyon playing a supporting role within the governing seasons (which are not proper histories themselves). Vague topics like "bodies", "catastrophe", "colonialization", and "identity" are discussed.
With neither the history nor the literary explication in focus, readers from both fields are left wanting. Misery has an interesting subject matter and benchmark texts that are worthy of greater and sharper focus, but in its present guise warrants only three out of five stars. ( )