Reviewed by:

• The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence by David Waldstreicher
• Vincent Carretta (bio)

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence, by David Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY, is both timely and necessary. Timely because his is one of two biographies published during the 250th anniversary of Wheatley Peters's annus mirabilis, the year in which she both published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and gained her freedom; necessary because of Cornelia H. Dayton's most significant biographical discoveries about her later life and marriage found since the publication in 2011 of the first full-length biography of the poet (Dayton, "Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton," New England Quarterly, vol. 94, 2021). Waldstreicher's biography is also a major contribution to the recent fictional, critical, pedagogical, and scholarly attention Wheatley Peters has received in Honorée Fannone Jeffers's imaginative biography in verse, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020); a special issue of Early American Literature (vol. 57, no. 3, 2022); a new attribution argument by Wendy Raphael Roberts (Early American Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2023); my revised edition of The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters [End Page 154] (Oxford UP, 2024); and my revised Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (U of Georgia P, 2023).

By publishing The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley with a nonacademic press, Waldstreicher will make more widely available a portrait of Wheatley Peters and her times familiar to the readers of Early American Literature who have followed the biographical, critical, and editorial work on her published in more academic venues during the past few decades, especially in the last dozen years. Waldstreicher graciously acknowledges that his biography of Wheatley Peters is based on the earliest edition of my own, as well as on my editions of her writings. Waldstreicher's view of Wheatley Peters, too, is that she is a skillful rhetorician and commentator claiming her place—subtly, when necessary, more overtly whenever possible—at the center rather than the margins of the literary, political, and social worlds in which she finds herself. She's a savvy businesswoman who exerts as much control over her life as she can, given her race, age, gender, and social status.

Waldstreicher's endnotes alone are worth the price of admission. Approximately half the number of the total words in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, his endnotes virtually constitute a literature review of the previous work done on Wheatley Peters by others, as well as by Waldstreicher himself. He proves himself to be a thoughtful and discriminating judge of his predecessors' contributions. Waldstreicher complements his extensive survey of Wheatleyiana with some additional historical contexts for her life and writings. The greatest strength of his biography may be his many very discerning readings of her canonical poems, a welcome focus on more extensive literary analysis than normally found in biographies aimed at a general audience. For example, his treatment of the role that classical literature in translation plays in Wheatley Peters's oeuvre is the most balanced, sophisticated, and thorough I have seen.

Waldstreicher does not participate in the conversation about how we should refer to the subject of his biography. Both Honorée Fannone Jeffers and Zachary McLeod Hutchins (Early American Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 663–67) have recently made compelling arguments that we should call Phillis by her married name, as either Phillis Peters or Phillis Wheatley Peters. When Phillis Wheatley married John Peters in November 1778, she chose to replace her enslaved surname with the name he had created for himself once he had gained his own freedom. Her decision to reidentify herself by renaming herself through marriage is consistent with my overall [End Page 155] representation of the agency she demonstrated during her life before she met John. Rather than seeing Phillis's decision to marry him as the disastrous mistake her nineteenth-century biographer would have us believe it to...

审阅者：

• 大卫·沃尔德斯特莱彻(David Waldstreicher)的《菲利斯·惠特利的奥德赛：一位诗人穿越美国奴隶制和独立的旅程》
• 文森特·卡雷塔（简介）

纽约市立大学杰出历史学教授大卫·瓦尔德斯特赖彻 (David Waldstreicher) 撰写的《菲利斯·惠特利的奥德赛：一位诗人穿越美国奴隶制和独立的旅程》既及时又必要。及时，因为他的这本传记是惠特利·彼得斯 (Wheatley Peters) 奇迹年 250 周年纪念期间出版的两本传记之一，这一年她发表了关于各种主题、宗教和道德的诗歌，并获得了自由；这是必要的，因为自 2011 年出版第一本诗人完整传记以来，科妮莉亚 H. 代顿 (Cornelia H. Dayton) 关于她晚年生活和婚姻的最重要传记发现（代顿，“失落的岁月恢复：米德尔顿的约翰·彼得斯和菲利斯·惠特利·彼得斯， “《新英格兰季刊》，第 94 卷，2021 年）。瓦尔德斯特赖歇尔的传记也是对惠特利·彼得斯最近在虚构、批评、教学和学术上的关注的一个重大贡献，惠特利·彼得斯在霍诺雷·范诺·杰弗斯富有想象力的诗句传记《菲利斯的时代》（卫斯理大学出版社，2020）中受到了关注； 《早期美国文学》特刊（第 57 卷，第 3 期，2022 年）；温迪·拉斐尔·罗伯茨 (Wendy Raphael Roberts) 提出的新归因论证（《早期美国文学》，第 58 卷，第 1 期，2023 年）；我的修订版《菲利斯·惠特利·彼得斯的著作》 [第 154 页结束]（牛津大学出版社，2024 年）；以及我修订后的《菲利斯·惠特利·彼得斯：束缚中天才的传记》（乔治亚大学 P，2023 年）。

通过与非学术出版社出版《菲利斯·惠特利的奥德赛》 ，瓦尔德斯特赖歇尔将让美国早期文学读者熟悉的惠特利·彼得斯及其时代的肖像更广泛地传播，这些读者关注着她出版的传记、评论和社论工作。过去几十年，特别是最近十几年的学术场所。瓦尔德斯特赖彻慷慨地承认，他的惠特利·彼得斯传记是基于我自己的最早版本以及我对她著作的版本。瓦尔德斯特莱彻对惠特利·彼得斯的看法也是，她是一位熟练的修辞家和评论家，在必要时巧妙地、尽可能公开地宣称自己处于文学、政治和社会世界的中心而不是边缘。找到她自己。她是一位精明的女商人，考虑到她的种族、年龄、性别和社会地位，她尽可能地控制自己的生活。

仅 Waldstreicher 的尾注就值回票价。他的尾注大约占《菲利斯·惠特利的奥德赛》总字数的一半，实际上构成了对其他人以及瓦尔德斯特莱彻本人对惠特利·彼得斯之前所做工作的文献综述。他证明自己对前任的贡献是一位深思熟虑且具有辨别力的判断者。瓦尔德斯特莱彻补充了他对惠特莱安娜的广泛调查，并为她的生活和著作提供了一些额外的历史背景。他的传记的最大优点可能是他对她的经典诗歌的许多非常有洞察力的阅读，与通常针对普通读者的传记相比，他对更广泛的文学分析的关注受到欢迎。例如，他对古典文学翻译在惠特利·彼得斯的作品中所扮演的角色的处理是我所见过的最平衡、最复杂和最彻底的。

瓦尔德斯特莱彻没有参与关于我们应该如何提及他的传记主题的对话。荣誉奖范诺·杰弗斯 (Honorée Fannone Jeffers) 和扎卡里·麦克劳德·哈钦斯 (Zachary McLeod Hutchins)（《早期美国文学》，第 56 卷，第 3 期，第 663-67 页）最近提出了令人信服的论点，认为我们应该用她婚后的名字来称呼菲利斯，如菲利斯·彼得斯 (Phillis Peters)或菲利斯·惠特利·彼得斯 (Phillis Wheatley Peters)。 1778 年 11 月，菲利斯·惠特利 (Phillis Wheatley) 与约翰·彼得斯 (John Peters) 结婚时，她选择用约翰·彼得斯 (John Peters) 获得自由后为自己创造的名字来取代自己受奴役的姓氏。她决定通过婚姻重新命名自己来重新识别自己，这与我对她在遇到约翰之前的生活中所表现出的整体表现[结束第155页]是一致的。她十九世纪的传记作者并没有将菲利斯嫁给他的决定视为灾难性的错误，而是让我们相信……