• Richard Beale Davis Prize for 2022
• Tara Bynum, Ana Schwartz (bio), and Michelle Sizemore

Awarded to: Rebecca Rosen

Honorable Mention: Camille Owens

From the magnificent volume of essays published in volume 57 of Early American Literature, the 2022 Richard Beale Davis Prize is awarded to Rebecca Rosen for "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven': Speaking and Discovering Infanticide in the Early American Northeast." The prize committee gives the distinction of Honorable Mention to Camille Owens for "'I, Young in Life': Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood." These essays are exemplary for their originality as well as their archival heft and acumen—most of all, for bringing to the fore underexamined topics now certain to have their due in the field owing to the remarkable groundwork of these investigations.

In her riveting study "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven,'" Rebecca Rosen examines cruentation (the belief that a corpse bleeds in proximity of the murderer) as a form of testimony in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century infanticide literature. Known as "the blood cry," cruentation functions as a postmortem method of investigation joining the corporeal expressions of blood and speech. A sign from God, the blood cry becomes incontrovertible legal evidence that privileges the voices of deceased infants over and above the voices of accused mothers "in a move anticipating fetal personhood claims of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" (86). In effect, Rosen argues, infanticide sermons and their cultural narratives raise the status of dead infants to public speakers and citizens while relegating women suspects to nonentities. Among its many strengths, Rosen's essay draws attention to the dead body as authoritative material evidence after the Salem Witch Trials, earning cruentation a place in Puritan judicial inquiry tantamount to the [End Page 7] spectral evidence in the trials. Rosen's attentiveness to the archive of infanticide sermons and other execution literature, as well as her commitment to reading her sources against the louder words of the famous Mathers, demonstrate the force of the blood cry in stifling condemned women or else permitting their speech only in acts of self-condemnation. Above all, the essay skillfully recontextualizes and historicizes Christian investments in voice as a metonymy for subjectivity, tracing how those investments in future children have long come at the cost of care for the adults, usually women, responsible for bearing them. For the committee, this work could not have been more powerful or timely.

Camille Owens's article, "'I, Young in Life," centers Phillis Wheatley in the social and political invention of early American childhood. Owens traces Wheatley's formative role in shifting cultural perceptions of white children from the unsentimental figures of previous centuries to cherished beings imbued with innocence and dependent on maternal comfort and care. Perhaps the most compelling feature of the essay is its exposure of "childhood's foundational role in the Anglo-American racial order" and its illumination of Wheatley's "strategic awareness of childhood's emergent power" (729). Through personal and poetic prowess, Owens argues, Wheatley challenges the racial hierarchy by commanding the racial politics of childhood, including her claim to the Lockean blank slate, a privileged state of impressionability granted to white children but denied to Black children and to be nurtured by the education further denied to Black children. Ultimately, Owens shows the political stakes of Wheatley's efforts to revalue the Black child and to frame Black children and Black families as "key sites in the struggle between tyranny and freedom" (744). Even as the white supremacist politics of sentimentality could not countenance her subversive sentimental depictions of Black children, these depictions would become an important legacy for African American literature. In recovering Wheatley's interventions in the culture of American childhood, Owens's essay makes a fresh and dynamic contribution to both Wheatley studies and childhood studies. [End Page 8]

ana schwartz teaches American literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and U of North Carolina P, 2023), and is at...

• 2022 年理查德·比尔·戴维斯奖
• 塔拉·拜纳姆、安娜·施瓦茨（简介）和米歇尔·塞兹摩尔

授予：丽贝卡·罗森

荣誉奖：卡米尔·欧文斯

丽贝卡·罗森 (Rebecca Rosen) 摘自《早期美国文学》第 57 卷发表的精彩散文集，因其“‘无辜者鲜血的声音从地到天大声呼喊’：讲述和发现美国杀婴事件”而荣获 2022 年理查德·比尔·戴维斯奖。早期的美国东北部。”评奖委员会将荣誉奖授予卡米尔·欧文斯（Camille Owens）“《我，年轻的生命》：菲利斯·惠特利和美国童年的发明”。这些文章因其独创性、档案价值和敏锐性而成为典范，最重要的是，由于这些调查的出色基础，它们使一些未被充分审视的主题在该领域中得到了应有的地位。

丽贝卡·罗森 (Rebecca Rosen) 在她引人入胜的研究《无辜者鲜血的声音从地到天大声呼喊》中，研究了 17 世纪末和 18 世纪的一种证词形式——钉刑（相信尸体在凶手附近流血）。世纪杀婴文学。十字刑被称为“血泪”，是一种将血液和言语的有形表达结合起来的死后调查方法。作为上帝的标志，血腥的哭声成为无可争议的法律证据，使已故婴儿的声音优先于被指控母亲的声音，“这是二十世纪和二十一世纪初胎儿人格主张的一个举动”（86）。罗森认为，实际上，杀婴布道及其文化叙事提高了公共演讲者和公民对死婴的地位，同时将女性嫌疑人贬低为无足轻重。罗森的文章具有众多优点，其中之一是引起了人们对尸体的关注，将其作为塞勒姆女巫审判后的权威物证，在清教徒司法调查中赢得了一席之地，相当于审判中的幽灵证据。罗森对杀婴布道和其他处决文献档案的关注，以及她致力于阅读她的资料来源，反对著名的马瑟斯的大声言论，证明了血腥的呼喊在扼杀被判刑的妇女或仅允许她们在行为中发表言论方面的力量的自我谴责。最重要的是，这篇文章巧妙地将基督教对声音的投资重新背景化和历史化，作为主观性的转喻，追踪这些对未来孩子的投资长期以来如何以照顾负责生育孩子的成年人（通常是女性）为代价。对于委员会来说，这项工作再有力也更及时。

卡米尔·欧文斯 (Camille Owens) 的文章《我，年轻时》以菲利斯·惠特利 (Phillis Wheatley) 为中心，探讨了美国早期童年的社会和政治发明。欧文斯追溯了惠特利在将白人儿童的文化观念从前几个世纪的冷漠形象转变为充满纯真并依赖母亲的安慰和照顾的珍贵生物方面所发挥的重要作用。也许这篇文章最引人注目的特点是它揭露了“童年在英美种族秩序中的基础性作用”，并阐明了惠特利的“对童年新兴力量的战略意识”（729）。欧文斯认为，通过个人和诗意的才能，惠特利通过掌控童年的种族政治来挑战种族等级制度，包括她对洛克空白石板的主张，这是一种赋予白人儿童但黑人儿童不具备的易受影响的特权状态，并由黑人儿童抚养。黑人儿童的教育进一步被剥夺。最终，欧文斯展示了惠特利重新评估黑人儿童并将黑人儿童和黑人家庭视为“暴政与自由斗争的关键场所”的努力的政治风险（744）。尽管白人至上主义的感伤政治无法容忍她对黑人儿童的颠覆性感伤描述，但这些描述将成为非裔美国文学的重要遗产。在恢复惠特利对美国童年文化的干预方面，欧文斯的文章对惠特利研究和儿童研究做出了新鲜而充满活力的贡献。[第 8 页完]

安娜·施瓦茨在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校教授美国文学。她是《Unmoored：在殖民地美国寻找真诚》一书的作者（奥莫亨德罗早期美国历史和文化研究所和北卡罗来纳大学 P，2023 年），并且在...